As Donald Trump was running for president in 2016, his old friend at the National Enquirer was scooping up potentially damaging stories about the candidate and paying out tens of thousands of dollars to keep them from the public eye.
Mr Pecker’s evidence was a critical building block for the prosecution’s theory that their partnership was a way to illegally influence the 2016 presidential election. But the former president has a long history of emerging unscathed from sticky situations, if not becoming even more popular. Instead, he sat at the defence table in a Manhattan courtroom with his lawyers, listening intently to Mr Pecker describe how he and his publication parlayed rumour-mongering into splashy stories that smeared Trump’s opponents and, just as crucially, leveraged his connections to suppress unflattering coverage.
Two Secret Service agents were stationed in the first row of the courtroom gallery directly behind Trump. Ten court officers stood around the room. Jurors intently listened, and some took notes. Mr Howard said he heard from Ms Daniels’ representatives that she was trying to sell her story and that the tabloid could acquire it for 120,000 dollars , Mr Pecker told jurors. Mr Pecker had had enough and he told Mr Cohen as much.
“I thought you had and we had an agreement with Karen McDougal that she can’t give any interviews or be on any TV channels,” Trump told Mr Pecker by phone, the former National Enquirer publisher said.
Source: News Formal (newsformal.com)
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