The clear hope: avoid legal liability.
Trump now faces a criminal trial over this payment. And whether the payment was campaign-related — rather than a personal amount — is one of the biggest legal questions. The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office says Trump’s alleged falsifications of business records, which would otherwise be misdemeanor charges, are felonies because they concealed a crime. He accused Trump not only of illegal payments but also of 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 heart of the matter on Tuesday, thanks to the testimony of David Pecker, former executive of the National Enquirer tabloid.
Pecker made clear that any effort to keep this payment away from the campaign would be difficult for Trump’s legal team — even if it tried to do so.
Pecker is an important witness because of his role in “catch and kill,” the practice of buying the rights to stories that allegedly reflect badly on Trump and then burying them. Pecker testified that Trump’s interest was in the campaign. He repeatedly suggested that this was the main concern of these efforts.
He recounted an August 2015 meeting at Trump Tower in which the strategy was developed. He said that during the meeting, Trump and his lawyer Michael Cohen – who was convicted of financial fraud – “asked me what I could do and what my magazines could do to help the campaign.”
In addition to “catch and kill,” the magazine published positive articles about Trump and negative articles about his opponents, often with Cohen contributing.
Pecker added that he saw the arrangement as mutually beneficial to the Trump campaign and himself, due to newsstand sales that favored a candidate popular with Enquirer readers. But the prosecutor then noted that Pecker buying a story and not running it didn’t really serve the tabloid’s goals.
Pecker acknowledged that part of the deal was only beneficial to Trump’s campaign.
Notably, Pecker revealed that he never bought or buried any stories about Trump before that August 2015 meeting. The deal appears to have begun about two months after Trump launched his 2016 campaign in June 2015.
The prosecutor quickly turned to stories about Trump that Pecker had bought and buried, including with a $30,000 payment to a doorman at Trump Tower. The doorman, Dino Sajudin, suggested that Trump might have had a child with a woman who had worked for him – a claim that remains unsubstantiated and which Pecker said was proven to be false.
In this case, Pecker said he would have to tell the story if it had proven true. But above all, he declared that he would only do so after the elections.
“That’s the conversation I had with Michael Cohen, and that’s what we agreed on,” Pecker said.
Pecker also testified that he talked to Cohen about releasing Sajudin from a nondisclosure agreement after the story turned out to be false, saying he had to do it. Pecker said Cohen pushed back and said it should only be done 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 do not directly address Daniels’ payment, given that the Enquirer did not purchase 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 Daniels’ situation, at which point Cohen arranged payment.
But Pecker’s testimony reinforced what might seem obvious at first glance: that these actions occurred as part of the campaign.
In addition to the confluence of events – the fact that Daniels’ payment was made in October 2016, shortly after the release of the “Access Hollywood” tape and so close to the election – there is the tape that Cohen released from a September 2016 conversation with Trump in which Trump suggests that these efforts to avoid bad stories were a matter of “delay.” Cohen also appeared to act as a campaign operative in 2016.
It remains to be seen how strongly Trump’s defense challenges the idea that the hush money payment was linked to the campaign. In opening statements Monday, Trump lawyer Todd Blanche appeared to endorse the idea that even if it was a campaign-related payment, it might be legal.
“There’s nothing wrong with trying to influence an election,” Blanche said. “It’s called democracy.”
Maybe Trump’s team will decide that the evidence is just too compelling and it’s not worth defending the idea. But if he doesn’t contest it, it would take off the table a defense that many conservative legal scholars had proposed in the early days of the scandal.
And it would strengthen the prosecution’s argument that this case is not just about hush money, but rather about election interference.
washingtonpost
