Hush money paid on candidate Trump’s behalf, publisher says
The National Enquirer’s parent company has acknowledged paying hush money to a woman who alleged an affair with Donald Trump to ‘‘suppress the woman’s story’’ and ‘‘prevent it from influencing the election.’’
The admission came as federal prosecutors announced during the week that they would not prosecute the company, American Media Inc., or AMI, for its role in a scheme to tilt the presidential race in favour of Trump. In the agreement, AMI said it would co-operate with prosecutors and admitted it paid US$150,000 (NZ$218,000) to Karen McDougal before the 2016 election to silence her allegations of an affair with Trump.
The deal signalled the unravelling of the deep relationship Trump and AMI CEO David Pecker had forged over decades. The deal made clear that Pecker, whose tabloid strongly supported Trump’s candidacy, had turned on the president.
AMI agreed to co-operate with the Southern District of New York in September, and the deal became public on Thursday as Michael Cohen, Trump’s longtime fixer, was sentenced for campaign finance violations for his role in arranging payments to McDougal and Stormy Daniels, the pornographic-film actress who also allegedly had an affair with Trump. The moves put additional pressure on the president as he faces multiple investigations and finds himself losing the protection of some long-standing allies.
According to the agreement, Pecker met Cohen ‘‘and at least one other member of the campaign’’ in August 2015. ‘‘At the meeting, Pecker offered to help deal with negative stories about that presidential candidate’s relationships with women by, among other things, assisting the campaign in identifying such stories so they could be purchased and their publication avoided . . . . Pecker agreed to keep Cohen apprised of any such negative stories.’’
Prosecutors also allege that Pecker and AMI played a key role in the effort to silence Daniels. One month before the election in 2016, after an agent for Daniels informed National Enquirer editor Dylan Howard that Daniels intended to tell her story publicly, Pecker and Howard contacted Cohen. Soon after, Cohen negotiated a US$130,000 deal to buy Daniels’ silence.
Theodore Boutrous, a First Amendment attorney at Gibson Dunn who briefly represented McDougal, said the relationship between Trump’s associate and the tabloid publisher ‘‘was a shockingly creative plan meant to change the way American citizens voted. That is an important and serious violation of the law.’’
Boutrous, who began looking into the National Enquirer’s role in protecting Trump in October 2016, said he always believed the tabloid ‘‘had teamed up with Donald Trump and his campaign to stop Ms McDougal from speaking out, solely to protect Mr Trump and help him get elected president. That seemed outrageous and illegal.’’
For months, AMI denied that it had acted in concert with Trump’s campaign, initially saying ‘‘there was nothing sinister’’ about their actions, another of McDougal’s lawyers, Peter Stris, tweeted on Thursday. ‘‘Today, the public has learned that AMI was lying.’’
The Wall Street Journal reported the details of the National Enquirer’s payment to McDougal days before the 2016 election. At the time, AMI told the paper that it ‘‘has not paid people to kill damaging stories about Mr Trump’’.
AMI’s non-prosecution agreement includes David Pecker and Howard, also the company’s chief content officer, who said in a June interview that Trump ‘‘has never been consulted on editorial decisions – or by himself or through intermediaries requested an article be written on a given subject or angled in a certain way,’’ Howard said. A representative for AMI declined to comment.
The agreement suggested that Pecker, who had a long-standing relationship with Trump, was of ongoing use to prosecutors.
In 1997, when Pecker was running the US arm of magazine publisher Hachette Filipacchi, he launched Trump Style, which was distributed in Trump properties. Pecker rented facilities at Mara-Lago for AMI board meetings, and Trump introduced Pecker at Pace University when Pecker received an honourary doctorate.
Long before Trump announced his candidacy, Pecker was involved in his political ambitions. In 2011, AMI helped manage a website, shouldtrumprun.com, which Cohen decided to launch with several partners.
‘‘Pecker has a deep industrial knowledge of how Trump and Cohen operated,’’ said one former Enquirer staffer.
Two months after Trump announced his candidacy, Pecker, Trump and Trump’s lawyer, Cohen, hatched a plan to help Trump’s campaign, according to prosecutors.
According to charging documents prosecutors filed against Cohen this summer, Pecker told Cohen that he would identify damaging stories about Trump and, when necessary, pay the sources involved to guarantee that they wouldn’t speak about them in public.
The tactic – an old one among members of the tabloid press – was known as ‘‘catch and kill.’’ Pecker reportedly kept documents related to damaging stories about Trump and other figures in a safe in his office.
AMI’s first known target on behalf of Trump was McDougal, a former Playboy centrefold model who said she had a long affair with Trump. The company paid her US$150,000 for the ‘‘rights’’ to her story, which it then declined to publish.
The charging documents also allege that Pecker and AMI played a key role in the effort to silence Daniels. One month before the election in 2016, after an agent for Daniels informed Howard, the Enquirer editor, that Daniels intended to tell her story publicly, Pecker and Howard contacted Cohen. Soon after, Cohen negotiated a US$130,000 deal to buy Daniels’ silence.
A few days later, on October 25, 2016, after Cohen hadn’t paid Daniels, Pecker and Howard warned him that Daniels was close to selling her story to another publication. They urged him to finalise the deal.
Whether exposure of Daniels’ and McDougal’s stories would have changed the outcome of the 2016 election will likely be debated for years. But Cohen and Howard clearly considered the matter of great urgency. The payment, to Daniels in particular, came at a sensitive time – just days after Trump was hurt by the leak of a videotape in which he boasted about grabbing women’s genitals, and amid news reports about women who said Trump had sexually assaulted them years earlier.
The disclosure of consensual affairs – particularly one involving a porn star that allegedly took place a few months after Melania Trump had given birth to Trump’s youngest child – could have been a decisive blow, particularly in states that Trump won by just a few thousand votes.
Trump initially denied knowledge of the payments to Daniels and McDougal, but he said on Tuesday that the Daniels payoff was a ‘‘simple private transaction’’ that wasn’t an illegal campaign contribution, as federal prosecutors contend. He has also suggested that Cohen agreed to plead guilty to limit his prison sentence for unrelated financial crimes.
The Enquirer itself was deeply committed to promoting Trump’s candidacy. Editors and executives at AMI sent digital copies of the tabloid’s articles and cover images of Trump or his political opponents to
‘‘At the meeting, (David) Pecker offered to help deal with negative stories about that presidential candidate’s relationships with women by, among other things, assisting the campaign in identifying such stories so they could be purchased and their publication avoided.
. . . Pecker agreed to keep Cohen apprised of any such negative stories.’’ Agreement between federal prosecutors and American Media Inc
Cohen in advance of publication, The Post has reported, citing the accounts of three people with knowledge of the matter.
Howard, however, said earlier this year that Trump had no influence on the Enquirer’s coverage – an assertion challenged by Cohen’s guilty plea. ‘‘We do not run or kill stories on the behest of politicians, even if they are the president of the United States,’’ Howard said in April. – Washington Post