Rudy Giuliani claims Michael Cohen's tape of Trump is 'powerful exculpatory evidence'

Leah Millis/Reuters

Rudy Giuliani, President Trump's lawyer, scowls as he gives an impromptu news conference

• Rudy Giuliani, President Donald Trump's personal attorney, responded to revelations that Trump was recorded in September 2016 discussing payments to a former Playboy model who claims to have had an affair with him.
• "In the big scheme of things, it's powerful exculpatory evidence," Giuliani told The New York Times of the tape.
• The tape was reportedly seized by the FBI earlier this year.
• Hope Hicks, Trump's former spokeswoman, said in November 2016 that the president had "no knowledge" of McDougal's allegations.

President Donald Trump's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani on Friday responded to revelations that Trump was recorded in September 2016 discussing payments to a former Playboy model who claims to have had an affair with him.

"In the big scheme of things, it's powerful exculpatory evidence," Giuliani told The New York Times, which broke the story of the tape's existence on Friday.

The Trump campaign said in November 2016 that the president had "no knowledge" of the alleged affair.

Giuliani confirmed that Trump had discussed the payment with his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, on the tape, which the Times reported was seized by the FBI during a raid of the Trump's attorney's properties in New York.

He added that Trump is recorded in two minutes of audio telling Cohen to write a check, rather than sending cash, to the centerfold model, Karen McDougal, so that the payment would be properly documented. But the payment was never made, Giuliani said.

When the Wall Street Journal first reported McDougal's allegations that she carried on a consensual sexual relationship with Trump in 2006, Hope Hicks, then the president's campaign spokeswoman, said the story of an affair was "totally untrue."

"We have no knowledge of any of this," Hicks said. Trump has separately denied having an affair with McDougal.

The National Enquirer paid McDougal $150,000 in August 2016 for the rights to publish her story, but the outlet never published the piece.

"Nothing in that conversation suggests that [Trump] had any knowledge of it in advance," Giuliani told The Times, referring to The National Enquirer payment.

The National Enquirer, whose CEO is a friend of Trump, has a history of publishing stories favorable to the president. "We never printed a word about Trump without his approval," a former top editor at the company told The New Yorker.

Cohen is currently the subject of a Manhattan US attorney's office investigation into whether he committed bank fraud, wire fraud, and campaign finance violations while working for Trump and leading up to the 2016 election. Federal investigators are probing whether Cohen's payments to women with damaging stories about Trump violated campaign finance laws.

McDougal, Playboy magazine's 1998 "Playmate of the year," says she met Trump at a July 2006 golf tournament in Lake Tahoe, California, where he allegedly also had sex with porn star Stephanie Clifford, whose stage name is Stormy Daniels.

In an eight-page, handwritten document obtained by The New Yorker, McDougal described details of her relationship with Trump, whom she said she met at a pool party at the Playboy mansion in Los Angeles in June 2006.

"I was so nervous! I was into his intelligence + charm. Such a polite man," she wrote of her first date with Trump at his Beverly Hills Hotel bungalow. "We talked for a couple hours - then, it was 'ON'! We got naked + had sex."

McDougal also wrote that Trump offered to pay her after the first time they had sex, but she declined the money.