President Trump reportedly devised a plan ahead of the 2016 election to buy the rights to all damaging information the National Enquirer and its parent company had collected on him since the 1980s to prevent it from leaking to the public.
With the help of his then-personal attorney Michael Cohen, Trump attempted to negotiate a deal with American Media boss David Pecker that would have prevented the National Enquirer from running negative stories about him. Such an agreement, first reported by the New York Times on Thursday, never came to fruition, though Pecker eventually helped quash a story about an alleged affair between Trump and former Playboy model Karen McDougal.
News that Pecker directed the long-running tabloid paper to avoid publishing sensitive allegations about the president comes just days after federal prosecutors granted the media executive and longtime Trump ally immunity as part of their investigation into hush money payments made to women who claimed to have had affairs with Trump.
Pecker’s company was subpoenaed by federal investigators in April and has since cooperated with their requests, including turning over records of communication between the tabloid and Cohen about McDougal’s claims. In a deal orchestrated by Cohen, American Media purchased the ex-model’s story about her alleged affair with Trump for $125,000 in August 2016.
Though McDougal’s story was never published, the episode led Cohen and Trump to worry about what other kinds of dirt the National Enquirer had collected on him over the years.
“It’s all the stuff — all the stuff, because you never know,” Cohen could be heard telling Trump in a recording released last month in which he appeared to be discussing their plan to suppress damning information about the then-Republican presidential nominee.
“I need to open up a company for the transfer of all of that info, regarding our friend David,” Cohen said, referring to Pecker.
Sources familiar with the batch of information collected on Trump told the Times it mostly concerned claims of extramarital affairs and his legal issues. The Associated Press previously reported that much of it was stored in a safe where Pecker kept the details of other “catch-and-kill” agreements between his company and celebrities like Trump.
