Former aide testifies to Donald Trump signing ‘stacks of checks’ while in White House and doubts he knew of hush money deal

Photo by Victor J. Blue – Piscine/Getty Images

Donald Trump’s secret trial resumed today with testimony from a former White House aide who was fired for speaking with reporters about what she saw around the Oval Office.

But Madeleine Westerhout has made it clear she has no hard feelings towards her former boss. Trump’s former executive aide cried on the stand Thursday and said, “I don’t think he’s being treated fairly,” as she spoke about her firing and her memoir spanning two and a half years in the circle restricted by Trump. She sat a few steps from the Oval Office.

Today, Westerhout also helped bolster Trump’s argument that he was unaware of the details of the hush money deal at the heart of the Manhattan district attorney’s case. She testified that of the “stacks of checks” routinely sent to the White House from Trump Tower for Trump to sign, he did not review each one he signed.

Westerhout was among a series of relatively quiet witnesses called by prosecutors after the two-day firestorm against Stormy Daniels, the adult entertainer who accepted a $130,000 payment to stay silent about her allegations of a sexual affair with Trump , then transformed into a vocal antagonist of the three-time GOP presidential candidate.

Westerhout gave jurors a glimpse into the Trump White House and, of interest to prosecutors, an idea of ​​who in the Trump Organization was still attracting the attention of the commander in chief while he was busy running the country .

Interviewed by Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Rebecca Mangold, Westerhout’s lawyer Michael Cohen, Trump’s financial director Allen Weisselberg and longtime bodyguard Keith Schiller. The latter joined Trump’s presidential team as deputy assistant and director of Oval Office operations. Westerhout testified this week that checks sent to Schiller from Trump Tower in New York then reached her and she took them to the Oval Office for the president to sign, then returned them overnight to Trump Tower.

Mangold asked Westerhout if mailing checks through Schiller was “a further circumvention of White House security protocols.”

“It was just a way to get things to him faster,” she said.

Prosecutors suggested the check trafficking between Trump Tower and the White House included monthly reimbursements in 2017 to Cohen for the $130,000 he paid Daniels. The prosecutor’s case hinges on proving to jurors that the reimbursements were falsified as income for routine legal work and became misdemeanors because they were intended to hide an undeclared campaign contribution – the $130,000 – and to illegally influence the 2016 elections.

Westerhout also spoke about a visit by Cohen to the White House that she helped plan, and an invitation from Trump that she passed along to White House communications director Hope Hicks. “Hey,” Westerhout wrote to Hicks in a text shown to jurors, “the president wants to know if you called David Pecker yet.”

Pecker was the CEO of American Media, the tabloid publisher that bought and buried the old Playboy model Karen McDougal’s story about a long-ago affair with married Trump.