The “Access Hollywood” tape proved to be very damaging to former President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign that the Republican National Committee started to plan how to replace him as the GOP’s presidential candidate, his ex-executive assistant testified on Thursday via NBC News.
Madeleine Westerhout, who worked as an assistant to a top RNC official ahead of serving as Trump’s assistant in the White House, described the post-tape tumult to the jury in Trump’s New York criminal hush-money trial.
“There were conversations about — if it would be — how it would be possible to replace him as a candidate if it came to that,” she testified.
The notorious 2005 tape that surfaced ahead of the 2016 presidential election caused some huge trouble for the Trump campaign, prosecutors have told jurors. In it, Trump brags about grabbing women. “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything…grab ’em by the p—y,” he said on the tape.
Trump’s team has tried, in its opening statement and in their cross-examination of DA witnesses, to dust off the $130,000 hush-money payment made to porn star Stormy Daniels as something he did to protect his family from learning of his alleged affair.
However, Westerhout’s testimony boosts the DA theory that paying off Daniels was an illegal campaign expense and that records were falsified as part of a conspiracy to influence the election.
