TRUMP PRAISED THE KEEPER OF HIS SECRETS
Ex-tabloid publisher buried damaging stories for incoming president.
Days before Donald Trump became president in 2017, a cadre of advisers, officials and allies descended on his office at Trump Tower: a future secretary of state, his soon-to-be chief of staff, the FBI director — and the publisher of The National Enquirer.
The publisher, David Pecker, may have seemed out of place, but he had just performed an indispensable and confidential service to the Trump campaign: He had paid off a Playboy model, Karen McDougal, who had said she had an affair with Mr Trump, and a doorman who had heard that Mr Trump had fathered a child out of wedlock. The future president, triumphant, thanked Mr Pecker for his service.
“He said, ‘I want to thank you for handling the McDougal situation’, and then he also said, ‘I wanted to thank you for the doorman situation’,” Mr Pecker testified at Mr Trump’s criminal trial in Manhattan on Thursday, leaving it unclear if anyone else heard the exchange. “He said the stories could be very embarrassing.”
Mr Trump also asked after Ms McDougal: “How’s our girl?” Mr Pecker said he replied, “She’s cool. She’s very quiet. No issues.”
That remarkable scene — where Mr Trump’s lofty new status as president-elect collided with his colourful New York habitat — was private until Thursday, when Mr Pecker recounted it to jurors.
He described in vivid detail how Mr Trump depended on him to buy and bury damaging stories that could have derailed Mr Trump’s campaign, the plot that prosecutors put at the centre of the case.
Mr Pecker’s testimony in the first criminal trial of an American president underscored how his support in 2016 is haunting Mr Trump in 2024.
The former publisher transported jurors into the room at Trump Tower that day in January 2017.
He was there alongside four people who would become key figures in the Trump presidency: Sean Spicer, a press secretary; Reince Priebus, the chief of staff; Mike Pompeo, CIA director and later secretary of state; and James Comey, the FBI director whom Mr Trump would ultimately fire.
Mr Trump introduced Mr Pecker to the men, and then added slyly that Mr Pecker probably “knows more than anyone else in this room”.
“It was a joke,” Mr Pecker testified. “Unfortunately, they didn’t laugh.” (On Thursday, however, Mr Trump chuckled at the defence table.)
Over nearly six hours of testimony on Thursday, Mr Pecker described how he had helped quash three scandalous stories about Mr Trump, including by setting in motion a hush-money deal with a pornographic movie actor, Stormy Daniels.
That payment is central to the prosecution’s case: Prosecutors have charged Mr Trump with 34 felonies, accusing him of covering up the payoff to Daniels.
Mr Pecker’s testimony, which kept many jurors rapt as Mr Trump shifted and slumped in his chair, spoke to a central theme in the prosecution’s case. Mr Pecker, prosecutors contend, joined a three-man conspiracy with Mr Trump and Michael Cohen, the then-candidate’s personal lawyer. The men, they say, hatched a plot to hide damaging stories from the American people.
Mr Pecker introduced the jury to a dark art in the world of supermarket tabloids, the practice known as “catch and kill” — buying the rights to a story with no intention of publishing it. The National Enquirer used the tactic to silence Ms McDougal and the doorman with his account of an out-of-wedlock child, which turned out to be false.
He took jurors behind the scenes of the shady machinations, detailing how he had bought Ms McDougal’s story for US$150,000 (5.5 million baht) and packaged the payment in a deal with other services that she would supposedly provide, including writing columns. Those services, he acknowledged, were camouflage for what he knew could have been an illegal donation to Mr Trump’s campaign.
In a powerful moment for the prosecution, Mr Pecker acknowledged a clear-cut motive for keeping the model’s story under wraps: protecting Mr Trump’s chance of winning the White House. “We didn’t want the story to embarrass Mr Trump or embarrass or hurt the campaign,” Mr Pecker testified.
He also acknowledged that it is unlawful for a corporation to spend money that way to influence the election, another pivotal moment in the early days of the trial. (The Federal Election Commission later punished the Enquirer’s parent company with fines of $187,000; Mr Trump’s campaign was not sanctioned.)
The Trump campaign was particularly concerned about Daniels’ story. Mr Pecker explained to the jury that he had learned Daniels was looking to sell her story just as Mr Trump’s campaign was reeling from the publication of an Access Hollywood recording, in which Mr Trump boasted of grabbing women by their genitals.
That tape, he said, “was very embarrassing, very damaging to the campaign”.