FBI officials, who are investigating Michael Cohen's role in providing hush payments to women who claim they had affairs with Trump, took the recording into custody during a raid on the lawyer's office. | Don Emmert/AFP/Getty Images Giuliani says Cohen recorded Trump discussing payments to former Playboy model

Michael Cohen, the longtime lawyer of President Donald Trump, secretly recorded a 2016 conversation between the pair about payments to a former Playboy model, Rudy Giuliani confirmed to the New York Times on Friday.

The conversation took place two months before the presidential election, the Times reported. FBI officials, who are investigating Cohen's role in providing hush payments to women who claim they had affairs with Trump, took the recording into custody during a raid on the lawyer's office and residence.


Not only was the payment discussed never made, but Trump had no prior knowledge of it, Giuliani said.

“Nothing in that conversation suggests that he had any knowledge of it in advance,” Giuliani told the Times. “In the big scheme of things, it’s powerful exculpatory evidence."

He added that, in the two-minute recording, Trump told Cohen to write a check, so that the payment to the former model would be documented.

The woman, Karen McDougal, has alleged she and Trump had a 10-month affair, beginning in 2006 and ending in 2007.

American Media Inc., which owns the National Enquirer, reportedly paid her $150,000 for exclusive rights to her story before declining to publish it; McDougal has said the deal was an elaborate effort by Cohen to keep her from going on the record.

In a later conversation with the Times on Friday, Giuliani clarified that Cohen and Trump discussed buying the rights to McDougal's story from the National Enquirer, which would have served as a form of reimbursement to the media company.

The revelation of the taped conversation is the most recent in a string of developments illustrating the potential legal and political risks that Cohen poses to Trump. Caught up in special counsel Robert Mueller's ongoing investigation and a separate probe involving his business dealings by the U.S. Attorney’s office in the Southern District of New York, the former Trump Organization executive has signaled his willingness to cooperate with authorities, telling ABC News in July that he plans to "put family and country first."

Cohen’s interest in speaking up publicly about his time representing the president continued Friday morning, when the Rev. Al Sharpton posted on Twitter that he’d recently spent an hour with Cohen. “I bet you’re wondering what we could be talking about! Stay tuned,” Sharpton, who hosts a Sunday morning MSNBC show, teased on social media.

Four minutes later, Cohen piggy-backed on Sharpton’s tweet, adding, “I have known Rev for almost 20 years. No one better to talk to!”

Cohen and his attorneys did not immediately respond to requests for comment. But in a late afternoon tweet Friday, Cohen lawyer Lanny Davis confirmed the tape’s existence. “Obviously, there is an ongoing investigation, and we are sensitive to that. But suffice it to say that when the recording is heard, it will not hurt ⁦@MichaelCohen212⁩. Any attempt at spin can not change what is on the tape,” wrote Davis, a former Bill Clinton White House lawyer who recently signed on to represent Cohen.

Addressing the New York Times’ report, a former federal prosecutor from New York’s southern district said it was "incredibly bizarre" and "certainly unethical" that Cohen taped conversations between himself and his clients. It could ultimately lead to disciplinary action for Cohen, although that threat pales in comparison to the other legal risks he’s facing.

The former prosecutor also dismissed Giuliani’s claim that Trump wouldn’t be in trouble because he talked on the tape about paying McDougal by check rather than cash.

"The fact that something was paid by check is not exculpatory in the slightest,” the former prosecutor said. “The federal prisons are full of people who thought, 'I paid by check and therefore I'm not doing anything wrong.' Whenever bad guys pay by check, they always have some false legitimate reason for why they're paying that way."

FBI agents raided Cohen’s office, apartment and hotel room in early April in connection with the federal investigation into potential wire fraud and campaign finance violations. The authorities seized more than 12,500 pages of paper records and obtained hundreds more pages of messages and cell phone logs from phones and a Blackberry — communications that remain at the center of a special judicial review to sort through potential attorney-client privilege issues. The FBI’s move also ignited Trump’s ire as he’s taken a more aggressive public stand against the Mueller investigation.

Cohen worked with Trump for a dozen years and was one of the earliest backers of the president’s political ambitions. During Trump’s 2016 campaign, he played the role of prominent adviser and spokesman but also had disagreements with others on the campaign.

Cohen wanted but didn’t get a job in Trump’s White House. Nonetheless, he remained close with the president, attending a White House meeting in May 2017 to discuss strategy on the unfolding Russia probe a day after Mueller’s appointment.

More recently, Cohen reportedly dined with Trump in March at the president’s South Florida Mar-a-Lago retreat and they spoke by phone as their lawyers started working together to try to shield materials seized in the FBI raid. Trump in April said Cohen was still representing him in a personal capacity, though Giuliani a month later said in an interview that the professional relationship had ended. “As far as we know, he’s not,” Giuliani said. “And there’d be nothing for him to do right now.”

Giuliani’s comment Friday represent his latest attempt to downplay the legal ramifications tied to a reported affair involving Trump and to temper concerns about whether Cohen’s potential decision to flip and become a witness in a case involving Trump would even matter.

“I like Michael. I think he’s been very badly treated,” Giuliani told POLITICO last Friday. “We’d like him to tell the truth. We’re confident he doesn’t have anything damaging to tell about the president.”

The former New York mayor already made waves in the Cohen case in May when he stated during an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity that Trump had reimbursed the lawyer for a $130,000 payment to porn actress Stormy Daniels. That remark contradicted the president’s account of what he knew about the arrangement to keep her silent about an affair she said she had with Trump.

“I’m giving you a fact that you don’t know,” Giuliani told Hannity. “It’s not campaign money. No campaign finance violation. They funneled through a law firm and the president repaid it.”

In a later interview with POLITICO, Giuliani said the reason why Trump paid Daniels rather than report her directly to law enforcement for extortion was “because that’d be extremely embarrassing to him and his family.”

“Those allegations, even when they’re untrue, lots of people believe them,” he said.

Michael Avenatti, the attorney representing Daniels, said in an interview Friday that federal authorities picked up more than just the single tape involving the president and Cohen talking about McDougal. “There are multiple tapes,” he said. “The bottom line is if Michael Cohen wants to be a patriot he should release the tapes. The government is not preventing him from releasing the tapes.”

Giuliani’s comments on the president’s personal affairs have gotten him in trouble before. He drew a rare rebuke from first lady Melania Trump’s office in June after he said during a conference in Israel that “she believes her husband” on the allegations he’d had an affair with Daniels.

Laura Nahmias and Lorraine Woellert contributed to this report.

