In May, Donald Trump was criminally convicted of covering up a hush-money deal with porn actor 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 Daniels’ 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 Trump, a payoff that eventually led to the former president’s conviction.

The new and unsuccessful push to keep Daniels quiet — coming amid Trump’s latest White House run — arose from a discussion over a debt she owed him in a separate civil case. Daniels had sued Trump for defamation, but the courts dismissed the case and ordered her to pay his legal fees.

Daniels eventually offered to pay about $600,000, slightly short of what Trump’s lawyer claimed she owed.

Trump’s lawyer, Harry J. Ross, agreed to accept the lower amount on one condition: that Daniels stop talking about the former president, both in public and privately. It would have been, in essence, a hush-money discount.

Ross conveyed the proposal to Daniels’ legal team in July, in a letter suggesting she sign a nondisclosure agreement. The deal would have effectively barred her from criticizing Trump or discussing any encounter they may have had.

Although “we disagree” with Daniels’ settlement offer, Ross wrote, Trump would accept it if 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 Wednesday when it was published by MSNBC in a special report by host Rachel Maddow. The network, Maddow said, had obtained the letter from Daniels’ 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 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 Daniels in the heart of a presidential campaign. And although the circumstances did not resemble the cover-up that 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 Daniels — and something of a moot point. She had already testified at 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,” Brewster said in an interview. “Nor would Stormy even consider that kind of muting of her voice.”

Instead, he said, 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, Daniels said that all the legal fees had “been paid,” adding that “Every bit from now on goes to us and not” Trump, whom she referred to with a scatological insult.

Public court filings in Florida confirm that Trump is no longer pursuing the debt and that Daniels has satisfied the judgment. The letter Ross sent in July seeking a nondisclosure agreement was not among those court filings.

Ross, reached on his cellphone, hung up on a reporter, and did not respond to an email.

Steven Cheung, a spokesperson for Trump’s campaign, issued a vague legal threat to the Times in a statement, and ignored the fact that Daniels’ 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.

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