A lawyer who negotiated hush-money payments on behalf of two women connected to Donald J. Trump sent dismayed text messages about the deals on election night in 2016, aghast that the clandestine payoffs might have influenced America’s decision.
The National Enquirer had bought and buried the story of one woman, Karen McDougal, and participated in the negotiations for the other woman, Stormy Daniels.
“What have we done?” the lawyer, Keith Davidson, wrote to an editor at The Enquirer after Mr. Trump’s victory, a text message read aloud during Mr. Trump’s criminal trial on Thursday.
Mr. Davidson said on Thursday that his text had been “gallows humor,” but added that “there was an understanding” that their “activities may have in some way assisted the presidential campaign of Donald Trump.”
In testimony this week at Mr. Trump’s criminal trial, Mr. Davidson repeatedly explained his growing frustration with Mr. Trump’s former fixer, Michael D. Cohen, who had made a $130,000 payment to Ms. Daniels to buy her silence. Mr. Trump’s reimbursements of that payment, which prosecutors said were disguised as legal expenses by the Trump Organization, are at the heart of the 34 felony charges against the former president.
Mr. Davidson, who is facing cross-examination Thursday afternoon, said that Mr. Cohen was temperamental and needy, noting the “many, many phone calls” and “many, many text messages” he received from him, with “little regard” for his schedule. He also doubted that Mr. Cohen would come through with the payment.
Mr. Cohen did, but Ms. Daniels’s story of a sexual encounter with Mr. Trump nonetheless became public in a story in The Wall Street Journal in January 2018.
Text messages and emails sent and received by Mr. Davidson have underpinned his two days of testimony. On Tuesday, he discussed a sense of urgency in Mr. Trump’s campaign after the release of the “Access Hollywood” tape, on which Mr. Trump was captured discussing how he groped women, and the origin of the pseudonym intended to mask Mr. Trump’s identity in the hush-money agreement with Ms. Daniels.
Mr. Davidson had spent several hours testifying on Tuesday, laying bare the seamy ways celebrity scandal is leveraged and sold. He described the deals he negotiated on behalf of Ms. McDougal and Ms. Daniels in 2016 that buried their accounts of sexual encounters with Mr. Trump.
The name David Dennison, which he had used to identify Mr. Trump in the nondisclosure agreement involving Ms. Daniels, belonged to a high school hockey teammate, Mr. Davidson testified. In the contract, the name was abbreviated to DD, for defendant. For Ms. Daniels, he used Peggy Peterson, shortened to PP, for plaintiff.
The first deal he struck that year was for Ms. McDougal, who said she’d had a 10-month affair with Mr. Trump a decade earlier. It began with a text message that Mr. Davidson sent to a National Enquirer tabloid editor: “I have blockbuster Trump story.” The tabloid’s parent company subsequently bought her story for $150,000 in an agreement that prosecutors say was part of a broader conspiracy to aid Mr. Trump’s candidacy.
The second deal, with Ms. Daniels, is the source of the 34 felony counts against Mr. Trump. The former president’s longtime fixer, Michael D. Cohen, paid her $130,000 to buy her silence. Mr. Trump falsified business records, prosecutors say, to hide his reimbursement of Mr. Cohen as legal fees.
Ms. Daniels did not have luck selling her story in 2016 until the emergence of the “Access Hollywood” recording, Mr. Davidson testified. The recording had a “tremendous influence” raising interest, he said.
But the tabloid did not want to purchase it, so the editor referred him to Mr. Cohen. Mr. Davidson negotiated an agreement with Mr. Cohen, but Mr. Cohen repeatedly delayed the payment and made excuses before eventually paying.