Former Aide Testifies About Donald Trump’s Signing Of “Stacks Of Checks” While In White House, Doubts He Was Aware Of Hush Money Arrangement

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

But Madeleine Westerhout has made clear there are no hard feelings toward her former boss. Trump’s onetime executive assistant cried on the stand Thursday and said, “I don’t think he’s treated fairly,” as she talked about her dismissal and her memoir covering 2 1/2 years in Trump’s inner circle. She had sat just steps away from the Oval Office.

Today, Westerhout also helped bolster Trump’s argument that he wasn’t in on the details of the hush money arrangement at the heart of the Manhattan District Attorney’s case. She testified that among the “stacks of checks” regularly sent to the White House from Trump Tower for Trump’s signature, he didn’t review every one that he signed. 

Westerhout was one of a string of comparatively low-profile witnesses called by prosecutors after the two-day tempest that was Stormy Daniels, the adult entertainer who accepted a $130,000 payment to stay quiet about her claim of a sexual liaison with Trump and then turned into a vocal antagonist of the three-time GOP presidential contender.

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

Questioned by Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Rebecca Mangold, Westerhout listed lawyer Michael Cohen, Trump chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg and longtime bodyguard Keith Schiller. The latter joined Trump’s presidential team as a deputy assistant and Oval Office operations director. Westerhout testified this week that checks sent to Schiller from Trump Tower in New York then went to her, and she would walk them into the Oval Office for the president to sign and then overnight them back to Trump Tower. 

Mangold asked Westerhout if sending checks by mail through Schiller was “an end run around the White House’s security protocols.” 

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

Prosecutors have suggested that the check traffic between Trump Tower and the White House included monthly reimbursements in 2017 to Cohen for the $130,000 he paid to Daniels. The DA’s case relies on proving to jurors that the repayments were falsified as income for routine legal work and became felonies because they were intended to conceal an undeclared campaign contribution — the $130,000 — and illegally influence the 2016 election. 

Westerhout also talked about a White House visit by Cohen that she helped to schedule, and a prompt 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 again.”

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