The following article by Philip Bump was posted on the Washington Post website July 24, 2018:
CNN aired audio from 2016 of Trump and Cohen discussing paying for a story about an alleged affair, after months of Trump and his advisers claiming ignorance. (Jenny Starrs /The Washington Post)
The now-famous conversation between President Trump and his then-attorney Michael Cohen which Cohen surreptitiously recorded seems to have taken place in the first week of September 2016 at Trump Tower. The audio, obtained by CNN, includes two bits of information that help us place it: A reference to a good CNN poll, like the one that came out on Sept. 6 of that year showing Trump up 2 points, and a reference to the campaign’s no longer being able to use Pastor Mark Burns as a surrogate. A few days prior, he’d been caught falsifying details of his biography.
That means that the conversation took place about a month after American Media Inc., the publishers of the National Enquirer, bought the exclusive rights to former Playboy model Karen McDougal’s story about an affair with a married man. That man, she alleged earlier this year, was Trump and, in the recorded conversation with Cohen, the rights to her story appear to be the primary subject of conversation.
We know that because CNN got a copy of the tape from Cohen’s attorney, Lanny Davis.