Hope Hicks caught up in FBI’s Michael Cohen raid
Monday’s FBI raid of the office and residence of Donald Trump’s attorney Michael Cohen was naturally terrible news for Cohen, and it didn’t take more than a moment to figure out that it was also terrible news for Trump. We’ve since learned that it’s bad news for the entire Republican National Committee. Now we’re learning that the Cohen raid is particularly bad news for Hope Hicks.
Buried about halfway through a lengthy New York Times expose published today, we find the names of two people named specifically in the search warrant that authorized the raid: “Prosecutors demanded all communication with the campaign — and in particular two advisers, Corey Lewandowski and Hope Hicks.” We don’t know why the Feds are focused on Cohen’s communications with Lewandowski, Trump’s former campaign manager. But it’s not difficult to figure out why they’re focused on Cohen’s communications with Hicks.
It’s long been established that Donald Trump doesn’t send or read email, and that the best way to get a written message to him during the campaign was to email it to Hope Hicks. In fact Donald Trump Jr testified to Congress months ago that he emailed Hicks about his Trump Tower meeting with the Russians. So it’s easy to parse that Cohen would also have been going through Hicks in order to get email messages to Trump.
The trouble here is that even if Hope Hicks wasn’t participating in any criminal plots that Donald Trump and Michael Cohen may have been hatching via email, she’s legally required to testify about everything she learned from being in the middle of those emails. In fact she’d better hope she was truthful about those emails when she testified to Robert Mueller, because misleading him about it would be a felony. In any case, even now that she’s resigned from the White House, Hicks is as caught up in this as ever.
