'Double-edged sword': Expert shows how Trump's own request led to 'gems' for prosecutors

Donald Trump's own request for discovery led to "some gems" for the team of prosecutors charging him with a hush money cover-up case, a legal expert said Sunday.

MSNCB legal analyst Lisa Rubin flagged the observation over the weekend, noting that, while the "Trump trial will resume tomorrow morning," the expert sought "to share an observation from my review of exhibits shown to Hope Hicks."

"Several of Hicks’s communications from the campaign — including the ones below with & about the WSJ regarding Karen McDougal — were initially produced to the feds by the Trump ‘16 campaign," Rubin explained on her social media, including various emails associated with the case. "How do I know? The combinations of numbers and letters used to designate this page — DJTFP__SDNY (aka its Bates stamp) —reflects it was first produced by Donald J. Trump for President to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York ('SDNY') and was then shared with defendant Trump by the DA."

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According to Rubin, "at least one of the communications shown to Hicks on Friday appears to have come directly in response to Trump’s late-stage document request to SDNY itself."

"You might remember that SDNY’s response to that request comprised well over 100k pages, surprised the DA’s office as well as Trump, and resulted in a weeks-long delay of the original trial date," she said. "But that belated production highlights that discovery can be a double-edged sword."

That's because, according to Rubin, "it appears from the Bates stamp on this document (USAO_SDNY_00084521) that the late-breaking, voluminous SDNY production contained some gems for the prosecution too."

"This is the October 7, 2016 email in which Hicks, confronted with the Access Hollywood tape story (and transcript) for the first time, advises other senior campaign leaders that the response should be 'deny, deny, deny,'" she said. "And as she noted in her testimony, the absolute denial strategy wasn’t a viable option because WaPo had a transcript and the tape, but 'it’s a reflex,' and one likely honed by the man she recognized as the real leader of the campaign’s comms strategy: defendant Trump. FIN."

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