Donald Trump should have followed his instincts on this point.
The summer before his election, the candidate at the time did not want to buy the silence of a Playboy Bunny.
Model Karen McDougal was going through the story of a romance with Trump ten years ago. But Trump was nauseous about the reward demanded, according to testimony given Tuesday at the former president’s secret trial in Manhattan.
“It always comes out,” Trump said of his hesitation, according to the trial’s first witness, former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker.
Trump’s words – and his concerns – would prove prophetic.
Not only would news of McDougal’s $150,000 payment eventually “spread,” but so would the $130,000 payment to a second sex accuser, porn star Stormy Daniels – the very reward behind the Trump’s ongoing secret trial.
Trump has vigorously denied having an affair with either woman. Trump also called District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s accusations that he falsified business records to disguise Daniels’ payment as “legal fees” a political “witch hunt.”
Bragg claims the documents were falsified to hide what was actually an illegal campaign expense intended to prevent 2016 voters from learning about Daniels.
“I think the story should be bought and you should buy it,” Pecker told jurors, describing what he told Trump about McDougal’s accusations during a June 2016 phone call.
Pecker had been helping his friend Trump for years, he told jurors, through a so-called “catch-and-kill” strategy in which dangerous stories would be bought by the tabloid and “taken off the market” instead of ‘be published.
But Trump wanted nothing to do with McDougal’s payment, Pecker said Tuesday, his second day on the witness stand.
“He said, ‘I’m not buying any stories,'” Pecker testified, describing Trump’s reaction to the jury of five women and seven men.
“He said, ‘Whenever you do something like that, it always comes out.'”
Trump did indeed keep his fingerprints on the $150,000 in cash from the National Enquirer that bought McDougal’s silence, Bragg’s prosecutors claim. The money came out of Pecker’s pocket.
But Trump is now on trial for a second secret payment that prosecutors say has Trump’s fingerprints all over it — the payment to Daniels.
Trump used an intermediary — Michael Cohen, his then-arranger and Trump Organization lawyer — as a fundraiser to manage the $130,000 transfer, prosecutors say.
Just 11 days before the election, Cohen transferred the money – hastily borrowed through a home equity loan – into the bank account of a shell company, and from there to Daniels’ lawyer, they said. jurors were informed during opening statements.
In an election where just 80,000 votes in three key states tipped the balance in Trump’s favor, voters never heard Daniels’ story — an alleged fling at a golf tournament in Tahoe in 2006, when Melania Trump was breastfeeding her baby Barron at home.
Throughout 2016, his first year in office, Trump falsified 34 Trump Org business documents to disguise Cohen’s monthly reimbursements as “legal fees,” Bragg claims.
In reality, the 34 invoices, checks and accounting entries concealed a payment to Daniels that was actually an illegal campaign expense, prosecutors say.
The trial ends Wednesday. Pecker’s direct testimony is expected to continue Thursday.
businessinsider
