Aw, poor Hope Hicks. She wept on the witness stand at her ex-boss’ election-interference criminal trial, moments after delivering testimony that screwed the criminal defendant big time. That was tough for her, because she’s clearly still besotted with the guy. Cue these lyrics by Neil Young:
“Don’t cry no tears… / Cause when all the water’s gone / The feeling lingers on / Old true love ain’t too hard to see”
Granted, Hicks performed a valuable public service by confirming under oath that Trump knew damn well that the payments to Stormy Daniels were designed to muzzle the porn star and thus rig the 2016 election in his favor. She recounted a conversation she had with Trump in 2018 after The Wall Street Journal broke the Stormy story: Trump told her that Michael Cohen had paid off Stormy “out of the goodness of his heart,” but Hicks knew Trump was lying to her because Cohen never did anything out of the goodness of his heart. And Trump viewed the Stormy scandal through the lens of the previous campaign; in Hicks’ words, “Mr. Trump’s opinion was, it was better to be dealing with (the Journal) story now, that it would have been bad to have that story come out before the election.”
Thank you, Hope! Toss her testimony into the pile of mounting prosecutorial evidence – including the handwritten notes, by (now jailed) Trump Org CFO Allen Weisselberg, detailing how Trump’s reimbursements to Cohen would be structured – and the prospects for a Trump criminal conviction seem ever more bullish.
But let’s not go overboard with gratitude for Hicks. If the prosecutors hadn’t compelled her testify under penalty of perjury, she would’ve stood with her man, hewing to her loyalty oath. As she confessed on the witness stand, her knee-jerk impulse after the pre-election release of the Access Hollywood tape (“…grab ’em by the pussy…I did try to fuck her, she was married…”) was to indulge Trump’s propensity to lie. She spread the word to campaign leaders: “Deny, deny, deny.” Indeed, she was fine with all the demagogic lies that Trump spewed throughout the ’16 campaign, and was rewarded with a prominent White House post.
Fortunately, from the prosecutors’ point of view, her fealthy to Trump is precisely what made her effective on the stand. That’s the kind of person you want the jurors to hear, an insider with no axe to grind, a loyalist who reluctantly swears to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth – and lets loose the waterworks.
Prosecutor Matthew Colangelo was rightly satisfied, and finished with a Hollywood flourish: “No further questions.”
Here’s hoping that when Netflix or Apple does the streaming series, Hope Hicks is played by Hope Hicks.
—
By the way – and this is not evidence at trial – we need to remember that motormouth Rudy Giuliani spilled the beans about Trump’s hush money payments way back in May 2018. On Fox News, he and MAGA doormat Sean Hannity discussed the Journal’s Stormy story. Rudy helpfully informed us that Trump was part of the whole payoff scheme:
“He did know about the general arrangement…That was money that was paid by his lawyer, and the president reimbursed that over the period of several months…(Cohen) funneled it through a law firm, and then the president repaid it.”
As Homer Simpson would say, “D’oh!”