In May, Donald J. Trump was criminally convicted of covering up a hush-money deal with the porn star Stormy Daniels.
By July, he had tried to hush her up again, a document newly released by her lawyer shows.
The first effort to buy Ms. Daniels’s silence stemmed from the final days of the 2016 presidential campaign, when she accepted $130,000 to keep quiet about a sexual encounter she said she had with Mr. Trump, a payoff that eventually led to the former president’s conviction.
The new and unsuccessful push to keep Ms. Daniels quiet — coming amid Mr. Trump’s latest White House run — arose from a discussion over a debt she owed him in a separate civil case. Ms. Daniels had sued Mr. Trump for defamation, but the courts dismissed the case and ordered her to pay his legal fees.
Ms. Daniels eventually offered to pay about $600,000, slightly short of what Mr. Trump’s lawyer claimed she owed.
Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Harry J. Ross, agreed to accept the lower amount on one condition: that Ms. Daniels stop talking about the former president, both in public and privately. It would have been, in essence, a hush-money discount.
Mr. Ross conveyed the proposal to Ms. Daniels’s legal team in July, in a letter suggesting she sign a nondisclosure agreement. The deal would have effectively barred her from criticizing Mr. Trump or discussing any encounter they may have had.
Although “we disagree” with Ms. Daniels’s settlement offer, Mr. Ross wrote, Mr. Trump would accept it if Ms. Daniels “agrees in writing to make no public or private statements related to any alleged past interactions with President Trump, or defamatory or disparaging statements about him, his businesses and/or any affiliates or his suitability as a candidate for president.”
The letter, whose contents were first reported by a freelance journalist, Bryan Anderson, last week, gained broader attention on Wednesday when it was published by MSNBC in a special report by the host Rachel Maddow. The network, Ms. Maddow said, had obtained the letter from Ms. Daniels’s lawyer. Her lawyer, Clark Brewster, then provided a copy to The New York Times on Thursday.
The letter was also included in a collection of stolen material distributed over the summer to several news outlets, including The Times. Prosecutors have said that Iran hacked Mr. Trump’s campaign aides and associates and disseminated sensitive communications between them. It is unclear whether all of the documents that were disseminated to the news media were obtained through the hack or leaked by someone else.
The nondisclosure agreement would have once again silenced Ms. Daniels in the heart of a presidential campaign. And although the circumstances did not resemble the cover-up that Mr. Trump was prosecuted for — it is not illegal to propose a nondisclosure agreement — the effort underscored his familiar tactic of using a financial exchange to control what gets said about him.
But a nondisclosure was a non-starter for Ms. Daniels — and something of a moot point. She had already testified at Mr. Trump’s trial, written a book, appeared in a documentary and assailed the former president on social media for years.
“It would be nonsense to put that toothpaste back in the tube, or even try to,” Mr. Brewster said in an interview. “Nor would Stormy even consider that kind of muting of her voice.”
Instead, he said, Ms. Daniels settled her debt thanks to a GoFundMe page, through which her supporters ultimately donated more than $1 million. In an Aug. 5 update on the page, Ms. Daniels said that all the legal fees had “been paid,” adding that “Every bit from now on goes to us and not” Mr. Trump, whom she referred to with a scatological insult.
Public court filings in Florida confirm that Mr. Trump is no longer pursuing the debt and that Ms. Daniels has satisfied the judgment. The letter Mr. Ross sent in July seeking a nondisclosure agreement was not among those court filings.
Mr. Ross, reached on his cellphone, hung up on a reporter, and did not respond to an email seeking comment on his letter.
Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Mr. Trump’s campaign, issued a vague legal threat to The Times in a statement, and ignored the fact that Ms. Daniels’s lawyer provided the letter after it had already been made public.
“These purported documents were attained as part of an illegal, foreign hacking attack against President Trump and his team,” he said.
“We are working with authorities to determine the legal repercussions for those likely committing federal offenses by posting and utilizing stolen material by terror regime adversaries,” he added, despite the fact that courts have established a First Amendment right to publish foreign-hacked documents, including in a case brought against the Trump campaign after Russian operatives breached the Democratic Party’s computer networks during the 2016 campaign.
The Times and other news organizations have previously published articles based on documents hacked by hostile foreign powers, including in that 2016 breach. And Mr. Trump, who that year publicly encouraged Russia to hack into Hillary Clinton’s emails, once told ABC News that if a foreign country offered him dirt on a rival, “I think I’d take it.”
The Times declined to publish Mr. Ross’s letter until it was able to authenticate its contents on Thursday, when Mr. Brewster provided a copy of it. The Times also declined to publish earlier material hacked from the Trump campaign because it contained no newsworthy information.
But the letter sheds new light on Mr. Trump’s dealings with Ms. Daniels, a relationship that has had profound legal consequences for Mr. Trump.
It is unclear whether Mr. Trump directed Mr. Ross to suggest the nondisclosure agreement, or if it arose organically during the discussions with Ms. Daniels’s lawyers.
Either way, the proposal was so broad that it would have been unenforceable, legal experts said.
“It’s just a taunt, it’s not a serious offer,” said Debra S. Katz, a prominent civil rights lawyer with an expertise in N.D.A.s.
Other experts said the latest effort to silence Ms. Daniels was unlikely to pose any legal jeopardy for Mr. Trump.
For one thing, Ms. Daniels rejected the nondisclosure agreement, so nothing was ever finalized. In addition, Mr. Trump did not cover up the negotiations, an act that led to his prosecution over the initial hush-money deal with Ms. Daniels and could now send him to jail.
The criminal case against Mr. Trump, brought by the Manhattan district attorney’s office, hinged on his effort to lie about the 2016 deal between Ms. Daniels and his fixer at the time, Michael D. Cohen. After Ms. Daniels received the $130,000 payoff, Mr. Trump reimbursed his fixer.
Mr. Cohen, who broke from Mr. Trump and was the prosecution’s star witness at trial, told the jury that Mr. Trump approved of a plan to falsify various records to hide the true purpose of the reimbursement. After a seven-week trial, the jury convicted Mr. Trump on all 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.
Ms. Daniels’s appearance on the stand marked an emotional peak of the trial. Her testimony recounted, in graphic detail, the sexual encounter she said she had with Mr. Trump in a Lake Tahoe hotel suite in 2006.
Mr. Trump, who has maintained his innocence and denied that a sexual encounter took place, has lashed out at the judge and jury and sought to throw out his conviction. His lawyers also managed to delay his sentencing until after Election Day. He faces up to four years behind bars, though the judge overseeing the case could sentence him to less time or only probation.
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