Photo : Drew Angerer ( Getty Images )

President Donald Trump isn’t claiming that he didn’t have an affair with ex-former Playboy playmate Karen McDougal (noting that you are a former Playboy playmates is the equivalent of noting that you were third trumpet in your elementary school marching band), at least not this morning. He’s using all his old-man vitriol to blast his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, for taping their conversation.




Late Tuesday evening, CNN dropped a bombshell exclusive when they got their hands on the actual recording of Trump and Cohen discussing a payment to try and stop McDougal’s story from getting out. The news station has confirmed that the audio they received is one of the reported 12 tapes that were seized during the April raid at all of Cohen’s hideouts, including his office and hotel room.


Here’s how CNN breakdown the contents of said audio between Trump and Cohen.

The recording offers the public a glimpse at the confidential discussions between Trump and Cohen, and it confirms the man who now occupies the Oval Office had contemporaneous knowledge of a proposal to buy the rights to the story of Karen McDougal, a woman who has alleged she had an extramarital affair with Trump about a decade ago. Cohen told Trump about his plans to set up a company and finance the purchase of the rights from American Media, which publishes the National Enquirer. The recording captures what appears to be a routine business conversation of several matters on their agenda. The audio is muddled and the meaning of Trump’s use of the word “cash” is disputed by the two sides. “I need to open up a company for the transfer of all of that info regarding our friend David,” Cohen said in the recording, likely a reference to American Media head David Pecker. When financing comes up again later in the conversation, Trump interrupts Cohen asking, “What financing?” according to the recording. When Cohen tells Trump, “We’ll have to pay,” Trump is heard saying “pay with cash” but the audio is muddled and it’s unclear whether he suggests paying with cash or not paying. Cohen says, “no, no” but it is not clear what is said next.

So what does all of this prove? Well, for many of us, it confirms what we’ve known since the beginning of time: Trump is a lying-ass liar. It also draws more heat to the flaming d umpster fire that is the Trump administration, and it started #TrumpTapes on Twitter, which is always amusing. Also it proves that Trump’s newest lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, is out of his fucking mind. In an attempt to explain how the tapes prove nothing, Giuliani invoked a count for how many times one needs to listen to said tapes and noted that he’s a fucking tape-listening expert!

“What I urge people to do is just go online, listen to your broadcast, you play the tape, play it three times, the third time you play it it will become clear,” Giuliani told Fox News.


“I’ve vetted tapes even longer than Alan Dershowitz. How about 4,000 hours of Mafia people on tape? I know how to listen to them. I know how to transcribe them. This tape is crystal clear when you listen to [it]. I’ve dealt with much worse tapes than this.”

I’m glad that the measuring stick for the president of the United States is the mafia as that seems rather fitting.




Also, this can’t be overstated that Giuliani is a lying-ass liar as he stated earlier this year that Trump had no idea about any payments to stop McDougal’s story from hitting the press and the audio from the tape clearly shows that Trump was in on it. But we knew that, too.

And now we wait for the rest of this dysfunctional dictatorship to implode.