When President Donald Trump’s hush money scandal broke in 2018 and his lies about it fell apart, he reverted to another strategy. He took care to instead suggest that the 2016 payment to adult-film actress Stormy Daniels wasn’t about the 2016 campaign. He called it a “simple private transaction” and said it was “not even a campaign violation” because the money hadn’t actually come from his campaign.
The clear hope: to avoid legal liability.
Trump now faces a criminal trial over the payment. And whether the payment was campaign-related — rather than personal — is one of the biggest legal questions. The Manhattan district attorney’s office argues that Trump’s alleged falsifications of business records, which would otherwise be misdemeanor charges, are felonies because they covered up a crime. It has accused Trump of not just illegal payments, but also election interference. “The defendant, Donald Trump,” prosecutor Matthew Colangelo said in his opening statement, “orchestrated a criminal scheme to corrupt the 2016 presidential election.”
We quickly got to the meat of the issue Tuesday, thanks to the testimony of former National Enquirer tabloid executive David Pecker.
Pecker made clear that any efforts to distance this payment from the campaign will be difficult for the Trump legal team — if it even attempts to.
Pecker is a significant witness because of his role in “catch and kill,” the practice of buying the rights to stories that would reflect poorly on Trump and then burying them. Pecker testified that Trump’s interest pertained to the campaign. He repeatedly suggested this was the overriding concern of such efforts.
He recounted an August 2015 meeting at Trump Tower in which the strategy was hashed out. He said that at the meeting, Trump and his lawyer Michael Cohen — who has been convicted in the hush money scheme — “asked me what can I do and what my magazines could do to help the campaign.”
In addition to “catch and kill,” the magazine would run positive stories about Trump and negative ones about his opponents, often with Cohen’s input.
Pecker went on to say that he viewed the arrangement as being mutually beneficial to Trump’s campaign and to him, by virtue of newsstand sales that favored a candidate the Enquirer’s readers liked. But then the prosecutor noted that Pecker’s buying a story and not running it didn’t really serve the tabloid’s purposes.
Pecker agreed that that portion of the arrangement was solely beneficial to Trump’s campaign.
Notably, Pecker also disclosed that he had never bought and buried stories about Trump before that August 2015 meeting. The arrangement appeared to begin about two months after Trump launched his 2016 campaign in June 2015.
The prosecutor soon turned to stories about Trump that Pecker did buy and bury, including with a $30,000 payment to a Trump Tower doorman. The doorman, Dino Sajudin, offered a tip that Trump might have fathered a child with a woman who had worked for him — a claim that remains unsubstantiated and that Pecker says turned out to be false.
In this case, Pecker said he would have to run the story if it had turned out to be true. But crucially, he said he would have done so only after the election.
“That was the conversation I had with Michael Cohen, and that’s what we agreed to,” Pecker said.
Pecker also testified that he talked to Cohen about releasing Sajudin from a nondisclosure agreement after the story turned out to not be true, saying he had to do it. Pecker said Cohen pushed back and said it should be done only after the election.
“I said, ‘Well, I’d like to release him now,’” Pecker said. “He said, ‘No. You release him after the election.’”
Sajudin was indeed released from his NDA after the election, in December 2016 — which prosecutors say reinforces that such efforts were about the campaign.
These parts of the testimony don’t pertain directly to the Daniels payment, given that the Enquirer didn’t buy the rights to her story — unlike the doorman’s story and the story of another woman who alleged an affair with Trump, former Playboy model Karen McDougal. Instead, the Enquirer contacted Cohen about the Daniels situation, at which point Cohen arranged the payment.
But Pecker’s testimony bolstered what might seem readily apparent on the surface: that these actions occurred with the campaign in mind.
In addition to the confluence of events — the fact that the Daniels payment was made in October 2016 shortly after the “Access Hollywood” tape emerged and so close to the election — there’s the tape Cohen has released of a September 2016 conversation with Trump in which Trump suggests such efforts to avoid bad stories were about “delay.” Cohen also seemed to be acting as an agent of the campaign in 2016.
It remains to be seen how hard Trump’s defense contests the idea that the hush money payment was campaign-related. In opening statements Monday, Trump lawyer Todd Blanche seemed to nod to the idea that, even if it was a campaign-related payment, it could be legal.
“There’s nothing wrong with trying to influence an election,” Blanche said. “It’s called democracy.”
Perhaps Trump’s team will decide the evidence is simply too compelling and it’s not worth going to bat for that idea. But if it doesn’t contest it, that would take off the table a defense that plenty of conservative legal minds offered from the early days of the scandal.
And it would bolster the prosecution’s argument that this case truly isn’t just about hush money, but rather election interference.
Source link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/04/24/how-peckers-testimony-bolsters-claims-trumps-election-related-scheme/