Stormy Daniels’ attorney has turned over communications between his client and Joe Tacopina, Trump’s current personal lawyer, to Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office, according to CNN.
The records, which neither CNN nor The Daily Beast has seen, reportedly date back to 2018, when the adult film star was seeking legal representation.
Her current attorney, Clark Brewster, said he believes that Daniels disclosed confidential information in her emails to Tacopina and his firm. Tacopina denied to CNN that the performer’s confidential information had been shared with his office, and said there was no conflict of interest regarding an established attorney-client relationship.
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He also denied ever having met or spoken to Daniels.
The report comes as Bragg’s prosecutors appear to be wrapping up their investigation into Trump’s alleged hush-money payment to Daniels, with New York City bracing for the former president’s possible indictment in the matter.
Trump has denied wrongdoing, blasting the inquiry on Truth Social earlier this month as a “political Witch-Hunt, trying to take down the leading candidate, by far, in the Republican Party.”
Earlier on Tuesday, it resurfaced that Tacopina, who began representing Trump in early 2023, had years earlier gone on CNN to proclaim that the hush-money arrangement was “illegal.”
“It’s an illegal agreement. It’s a fraud, if that’s, in fact, the case,” Tacopina said in 2018. “It doesn’t pass the straight-face test, and quite frankly, if that is what happened, we have a potential campaign finance issue.”
In a separate appearance on the network that year, Tacopina also indicated to host Don Lemon he’d been in contact with Daniels as she searched for an attorney. He added that he couldn’t “really talk about my impressions or any conversations we’d had because there is an attorney-client privilege that attaches even to a consultation.”
On Tuesday, Tacopina told CNN that his previous comments “lacked clarity.” He explained that he’d invoked privilege in his Lemon appearance to get the host to drop his line of questioning, “because someone on Stormy Daniel’s behalf did ask whether I would represent her, and I did not wish to discuss the matter on television.”
“However, those circumstances do not give rise to an attorney-client relationship in any form,” Tacopina said.
