During the second day of Donald Trump’s criminal trial in the Stormy Daniels affair, David Pecker, the former head of the American tabloid National Enquirer, revealed that he bought sensitive information about the former president to keep it secret. The goal was to protect the Republican candidate during the 2016 presidential campaign.
“Eyes and ears” of Donald Trump. This is how David Pecker, the first witness called to the stand in the criminal trial against the former US president, defined himself. Before a New York court, this former manager of the National Enquirer tabloid revealed on Tuesday, April 23, how he pledged to serve the campaign of the Republican candidate in 2016, claiming that he discussed this strategy in the presence of Donald Trump.
Key testimony for the prosecution, which wants to convict Donald Trump of covering up a $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford. The former porn star claims she had an extramarital affair with the billionaire in 2006 – which the person in question denies – and that she received the payment before the 2016 presidential election to keep quiet.
David Pecker was involved in this type of negotiation, known as “catch and kill”. At the head, a former close friend of Donald Trump explained how his tabloid served the interests of the former president: by turning rumors into sensational headlines aimed at harming his rivals, but also by hiding compromising information to protect the Republican candidate.
Post “positive articles about Trump”
The two met in the 1980s at Donald Trump’s residence in Mar-a-Lago, Florida, a press officer said at the stand. In 1999, he bought The National Enquirer, a publication that later benefited from the success of Donald Trump’s reality TV show “The Apprentice.”
When the billionaire announced his candidacy for the Republican primary in 2015, their ties strengthened. Michael Cohen, a lawyer and confidant of Donald Trump, then served as an intermediary between the two. On June 16, 2015, on the day of the candidacy announcement in Trump Tower, David Pecker was among the guests.
During his testimony in court, David Pecker was questioned about a key meeting held in August 2015 at Trump Tower in New York, in the presence of Donald Trump, Michael Cohen and his adviser Hope Hicks. “They asked me what I could do, what my magazines could do to help his campaign (…), I said I would publish positive articles about Trump and negative articles about his opponents,” Michael Pecker told jurors.
He specifies that he promised that they would be his “eyes and ears” and that he would respond to all rumors “about women selling stories” about him, because at that time the candidate “was known as the most eligible bachelor”, he said, although he married with his third wife Melania in 2005.
During the hearing, prosecutors played a screenshot showing several flattering headlines published by the National Enquirer, such as “Donald Dominates!” and “World Exclusive: Donald Trump Nobody Knows.” For his part, David Pecker described Michael Cohen as the shadow architect behind the tabloids’ pro-Trump coverage, telling him to take on other Republican candidacies that were gaining momentum.
Buy silence
According to David Pecker, Michael Cohen called him to direct it, as did Dylan Howard, the editor of the tabloid at the time. He said “which candidate and in which direction should we go”. In March 2016, for example, the tabloid published articles falsely linking the father of Ted Cruz, Republican rival Donald Trump, to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
This “highly confidential” agreement, as David Pecker described it, also provided protection for Donald Trump. When he discovered that a doorman at Trump Tower was “(peddling) the story of Donald Trump’s illegitimate child,” David Pecker sprang into action. “I immediately called Michael Cohen.” Although it lacked credibility, this “exclusive” information was obtained for $30,000 from a gatekeeper to keep the story quiet, a sum three times the going rate for a typical celebrity.
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“I decided to buy the story because of the potential embarrassment it presented to the campaign and to Donald Trump,” David Pecker said on the stand. If the story was true, he planned to publish it “after the election,” he said, because “it would probably be the biggest sale of the National Enquirer since Elvis Presley died.”
In 2016, David Packer learned that Karen McDougal, a former Playboy magazine model, was about to reveal her affair with Donald Trump, which would have lasted a year, ten years earlier. After several conversations with Michael Cohen, David Pecker discusses the situation with Donald Trump himself. According to him, he advised him to buy the story, which he refused. “He said that every time you do something like that, it always gets known,” Michael Pecker said. Although this story was suppressed from the beginning, $150,000 was paid to the former Playboy model to keep her story quiet.
Illegal campaign spending
In the eyes of the prosecution, these incidents are key to showing the existence of a ruse to cover up any scandal. In total, Donald Trump is charged with 34 counts of falsifying the accounting documents of his group of companies, the Trump Organization, to conceal payments to Stormy Daniels.
Read alsoTime and money: Donald Trump hampered by his legal problems
Donald Trump’s lawyer, Todd Blanche, insisted that the payments were legal. He emphasized that this is the normal functioning of “democracy”, thereby rejecting the idea of a conspiracy. While such payments are not illegal per se, the arrangement with Stormy Daniels could constitute a campaign expense. However, the amount does not appear in the candidates’ accounts. The prosecutor will have to prove that this expense, disguised as attorney’s fees, was intended to help Donald Trump win the 2016 presidential election against Hillary Clinton.
On Tuesday, the court considered the possibility of sanctioning the former president for contempt of court, due to his repeated attacks on witnesses and jurors on social networks. Prosecutors sought maximum fines of $1,000 per infringing publication and reminded Donald Trump that a shutdown remains “an option if necessary.” The judge has not yet made a decision. For his part, David Pecker will continue to testify on Thursday. He’s about to dive right into the heart of the matter with the Stormy Daniels affair.
With agencies
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