NEW YORK — Jurors at Donald Trump’s Manhattan trial on Thursday heard audio of him discussing plans to pay hush money to a Playboy model with his former fixer-turned-foe Michael Cohen — tying him to the deal his legal team has vigorously sought to distance him from.

“I need to open up a company for the transfer of all of that info regarding our friend David,” Cohen was heard saying on a recording he secretly made in September 2016, in seeming reference to David Pecker, the former head of tabloid publisher American Media.

On the recording, Cohen tells Trump, “I’ve spoken to Allen Weisselberg about how to set the whole thing up,” in terms of “funding,” referring to the Trump Organization’s longtime, twice-convicted finance chief.

“What do we got to pay for this? One-fifty?” Trump said.

Later on the tape, which CNN reported on in 2018, Cohen is heard saying, “We’ll have to pay,” and Trump says, “Pay with cash,” prompting his fixer to respond, “No, no, no,” before Trump says “check” and the recording ends.

The potentially damning evidence came in during testimony from Doug Daus, a staffer at the Manhattan district attorney’s high-tech analysis unit who authenticated digital evidence. Members of the jury appeared riveted as Trump and Cohen’s voices echoed off the courtroom walls. Trump looked peeved.

The tape was played shortly after the jury heard extensive testimony from Keith Davidson, the lawyer who repped McDougal and porn star Stormy Daniels in 2016 as the two women mulled coming forward with unflattering information about Trump in the leadup to the election.

AMI, the National Enquirer’s parent company, handled the $150,000 payment to McDougal in a deal finalized in August 2016, the jury heard from the women’s former lawyer and last week from Pecker. The model has long claimed she had a nearly yearlong affair with Trump starting in 2006, not long after he wed Melania.

Trump is charged in the case with 34 counts of falsification of New York business records, accusing him of covering up payment to Cohen in 2017 to disguise that it was reimbursement for paying Daniels $130,000 in late October 2016. He’s pleaded not guilty and could spend up to four years in prison if convicted.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office alleges the payments to Cohen during Trump’s first year in the White House rounded off an illicit scheme to defraud the American electorate devised at an August 2015 meeting at Trump Tower attended by Trump, Cohen and Pecker, who told jurors last week he agreed to be the budding Trump campaign’s “eyes and ears.”

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