Donald Trump fought mightily before and after he was elected president to keep secret the embarrassing details of his private life, but often failed despite having a fat checkbook and a well-connected tabloid editor in his pocket, according to the first week of evidence at his trial. Over four days of testimony this week, former National Enquirer executive David Pecker told the jury just how deeply involved Trump’s team was in using the supermarket tabloid to fuel his 2016 presidential campaign. Prosecutors tried to show that Trump was acutely aware of the machinations being made on his behalf by the tabloid executive and Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer and fixer. After Pecker’s testimony concluded Friday, jurors heard from Trump’s longtime assistant and Cohen’s former banker.
Evidence shows Cohen paid $130,000 in hush money to adult-film actress Stormy Daniels shortly before the 2016 election to buy her silence about an alleged sexual encounter she had with Trump years earlier. For years, Pecker told the jury, he and his friend Trump — then a reality TV star — had a mutually beneficial relationship that involved information-sharing in the celebrity world. When Trump decided to run for president, that relationship kicked into overdrive, as the supermarket gossip sheet published glowing stories about the brash tycoon, and ran many other stories pummeling his political rivals. Yet the first week of trial testimony showed the arrangement was far from foolproof. Just four days before the 2016 election, the Wall Street Journal revealed that the Enquirer had secretly paid a Playboy model, Karen McDougal, for the rights to her story about an affair with Trump. The Enquirer then refused to publish the story, a practice known as “catch and kill.”
After the Journal wrote about the arrangement, Trump called Pecker, furious. “How could this happen? I thought you had this under control,” Trump said, according to Pecker. “He was very agitated.” At the time, Pecker’s company publicly denied buying McDougal’s story to keep her quiet. After being granted immunity from prosecution, however, he testified that was precisely what he’d done. Cohen promised him he would be reimbursed for paying McDougal, Pecker said, but his lawyers warned him later that such compensation was potentially a crime — and said he may have already broken campaign finance law by paying McDougal. And so, Pecker testified, he balked at paying again when a lawyer for Daniels came forward to sell her story of a sexual tryst with Trump.
“I am not purchasing this story. I am not going to be involved with a porn star, and I am not a bank,” Pecker said he told Cohen. Trump ultimately instructed Cohen to pay Daniels $130,000 for her silence, according to evidence from this case. Prosecutors alleged that these payments were categorized as a legal fee, rather than a campaign expense, to keep them from public disclosure forms. Trump’s defense team has argued that most of what the prosecutors are showing the jury is not criminal conduct, saying that if any crime was committed, it was by Cohen, not Trump. But evidence they elicited from Pecker shows Trump was still trying to keep those secrets after he won the election.
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