Fox News Anchor Surprised Hope Hicks Testified ‘There Were Rumors of Another’ Trump Tape in 2016
Fox News anchors John Roberts and Shannon Bream discussed the testimony of former top Trump aide Hope Hicks at the former president’s hush money trial on Friday.
Bream spoke to Roberts about what she saw inside the courtroom, where cameras are not allowed. Discussing Donald Trump’s mood, Bream noted, “Well, he does seem more engaged today. Sitting at the defense table, he seems to be sending notes and whispering back and forth, primarily with attorney Todd Blanch and others on his team.”
“So he does seem like he’s a little bit more actively involved in talking about what’s going on in the courtroom as part of his defense,” she added of Trump who has repeatedly fallen asleep in court.
“He was very subdued as Hope Hicks took the stand. She was visibly sort of shaken and shaky and sort of nervous. She even said to the jury at one point, I’m very nervous. It was clear from the beginning that she was uncomfortable. I think it was interesting to a lot of us to find out, too, that supposedly she’s not had communication with former President Trump since fall or summer of 2022. So he’s obviously very interested in what she has to say today, and does seem actively engaged with his team in a way that we haven’t seen on other days,” Bream concluded.
Roberts then noted, “From what I know of Hope Hicks and I interacted with her a lot when she was the communications director at the White House and the press secretary for the campaign prior to that is the last place she wants to be is front and center in the limelight.” He added:
But she did say something interesting that I didn’t know about at the time, and that is that there were rumors of another tape out there, and that she dispatched Michael Cohen to look into that. Apparently that came up as a dry well. There was nothing there. But then there was also this idea of when the Wall Street Journal article was about to hit regarding Karen McDougal. She actually went so far as to ask Cohen to call David Pecker, and she called David Pecker to find out what was going on with that article.
“Yeah. With the prosecution’s direct examination of her. You’re hearing about all of that scrambling about being notified by reporters are being tipped off people by people that a story was coming. And you’re right. Cohen, of course, has been known not only as an attorney for President Trump, but as a fixer,” Bream replied, adding:
And so he is a part of these conversations that Hope is relating again and again from the stand that he was part of, trying to track these things down, quiet these things down. And certainly those conversations with David Pecker were ongoing multiple times, phone calls and other communications between all kinds of people within Trump’s circle. Hope Hicks had testified that she had actually known David Pecker before she started to work for Trump, because she worked in PR for a long time. So she had familiarity with him. But but what the prosecution is definitely trying to get to is that there was a sense of panic on the campaign trail, that these were related to the campaign, and not just personal issues for Donald Trump.
The prosecution must both prove that Trump and his associates falsified business documents related to the hush money payments central to the case, but also that his actions were a campaign violation – in order for the charges to reach a criminal level.
Watch the clip above via Fox News.
