It’s not just one tape – FBI now has multiple incriminating tapes of Donald Trump and Michael Cohen
Michael Cohen secretly recorded a conversation he had with Donald Trump about illegally paying off Trump’s mistress Karen McDougal during the election, and the FBI now has possession of that incriminating tape. Trump’s camp isn’t even bothering to deny that the tape is real, and in fact confirmation is now coming in from multiple directions that there are in fact additional such tapes of Trump and Cohen.
The existence of the tape was first reported this morning by the New York Times, but this was just the beginning of the saga as the day has gone on. The FBI seized the tape during its raid of Michael Cohen’s office earlier this year. Since that time, a federal judge and special master have ruled that virtually none of the evidence seized in that raid is protected by attorney-client privilege, and is therefore admissible as evidence. Donald Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani is now acknowledging that the tape is indeed real. It gets worse.
Michael Avenatti, the attorney suing Michael Cohen on behalf of his client Stormy Daniels, then asserted that there are multiple such tapes, tweeting “there is a reason why I used the term that I did and demanded the release of the TrumpT apes as opposed to the Trump Tape.” Sure enough, after Giuliani admitted to the NY Times that the tape in question does exist, Giuliani then admitted to CNN that the FBI has multiple recordings of Trump and Cohen.
The one tape in question appears to incriminate several people. It catches Donald Trump and Michael Cohen in the act of plotting a felony conspiracy, as it’s illegal for a candidate to buy someone’s silence during an election. The payment to Karen McDougal was ultimately made by the National Enquirer, which is run by a close ally of Trump. If the National Enquirer was conspiring with Trump to make this payment, then it also committed a felony. And this is before getting to the other tapes, whose specific content is not yet known – but the day is still young.
