The man who wrote The Making of Donald Trump said that the president had him investigated in attempts to silence him.
David Cay Johnston told MSNBC Saturday morning that Trump attempted to dig up dirt on him while he was working on the 2016 biography on the businessman and now-president.
“Well, Donald has long had other people investigated to try and get them to back off. He did it to me. And the whole model here is one of, as we’ve been discussing, extortion — of suppressing news,” Johnston said when discussing Jeff Bezos’ accusation that the National Enquirer attempted to blackmail him.
The 70-year-old investigative journalist and author also talked about Trump’s desire to bury stories that portray him negatively and the National Enquirer’s involvement in making stories about his alleged affairs go away.
Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos revealed this week the parent company of the Enquirer, American Media Inc., threatened to publish racy photos of him — including a “below the belt selfie — otherwise colloquially known as a ‘d*ck pick,’” as an email Bezos published put it — unless he stopped investigating how the publication got salacious texts between him and his mistress.
Bezos and his wife, MacKenzie, announced an end to their 25-year marriage mere days before the publication of the texts.
Johnston said that Trump, who often attacks media for being “fake news” and having an anti-Trump agenda, investigated him so he would be able to silence Johnston with any dirt he found while writing the biography.
