The New York Times reported Friday that President Trump’s longtime personal fixer and attorney, Michael Cohen, secretly recorded a conversation with Trump, two months before the 2016 presidential election, about payments made to a Playboy model who said she had an affair with Trump in 2006.

Federal agents seized the tape earlier this year during raids on Cohen’s properties, the paper said, amid a Justice Department investigation into Cohen’s involvement with payments made to women to muffle potentially damaging stories in the midst of the campaign.

Trump’s new lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, confirmed the existence of the tapes to the Times but downplayed their significance, insisting: “Nothing in that conversation suggests that he had any knowledge of it in advance.”

The Times’ bombshell comes at a pivotal time for Cohen, who spent a decade at Trump’s side and once styled himself as Trump’s most doggedly loyal lieutenant. But Cohen has been sending signals lately, amid an investigation into his business affairs, that he may be prepared to share everything he knows with investigators, including potentially revealing information about Trump.

The model, Karen McDougal, has said she had an affair with Trump before selling the rights to her story to The National Enquirer for $150,000 during the waning months of the presidential campaign.

But the paper, which is run by longtime Trump friend David Pecker, never ran the story, effectively keeping it silent.

Confirmation of the tape’s existence follows months of swirling speculation over whether Cohen recorded his conversations with Trump and others.