NEW YORK (AP) — A longtime editor of a tabloid publication testified yesterday that he promised to be Donald Trump’s “eyes and ears” during his 2016 presidential campaign, recounting how he promised the then-candidate he would help suppress damaging stories. and even managed to buy the silence of a doorman.
David Pecker’s testimony was designed to bolster prosecutors’ claims of a decades-long friendship between Trump and the former “National Enquirer” editor that culminated in a deal to give the candidate’s lawyer a leg up on negative leads and stories to that could be annulled.
Pecker is the first witness in Trump’s trial in Manhattan, in which he faces 34 counts of falsifying business records regarding payments intended to prevent damaging stories from coming to light in the final days of the 2016 campaign.
The effort to suppress damaging information was designed to illegally influence the election, prosecutors have alleged as they seek to raise the severity of the first trial of a former US president and the first of four criminal cases against Trump to reach a jury.
With Trump sitting just feet away in the courtroom, Pecker detailed his intimate behind-the-scenes involvement in Trump’s rise from political rookie to the Republican nomination and then to the White House.
He explained how he and the “National Enquirer” turned rumors into sensational articles smearing Trump’s opponents and, just as importantly, leveraged their connections to suppress dirty stories about Trump, including a porn actress’ claim of a sexual encounter. extramarital a decade earlier.
Pecker traced the origins of their relationship to a meeting in the 1980s at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, and said the friendship blossomed alongside the success of the real estate developer’s television show “The Apprentice” and the subsequent celebrity version of the show.
Their ties were cemented during a crucial August 2015 meeting at Trump Tower involving Trump, his lawyer and confidant Michael Cohen, and another aide, Hope Hicks, in which Pecker was asked what he and he could do. the magazines he ran for the campaign.
Pecker said he volunteered to publish positive stories about Trump and negative stories about his opponents.
He then told jurors how he told Trump: “I will be your eyes and your ears.”
“I told him that anything I heard in the market, if I heard anything negative about you, or if I heard about women selling stories, I would notify Michael Cohen,” so that the rights would be bought and the stories killed.
“So they wouldn’t be published?” asked prosecutor Joshua Steinglass.
“So they wouldn’t be published,” Pecker responded.
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2024-05-05 17:09:29