President Trump said Tuesday he didn’t know beforehand that the National Enquirer, run by longtime ally David Pecker, was planning to expose billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos‘ extramarital affair.
The tabloid’s January scoop, which included racy text messages between Bezos — a frequent target of Trump’s Twitter barbs — and his mistress, Lauren Sanchez, raised immediate speculation that it was an effort to take down a political opponent. Trump has frequently complained that he’s a victim of “presidential harassment” and described unfavorable coverage by the Washington Post, which Bezos owns, as “fake news.”
In the aftermath, Bezos retained security consultant Gavin de Becker to find out how the company accessed his private messages, an inquiry he says prompted Enquirer owner American Media Inc. to threaten to publish salacious photos of him and Sanchez unless he agreed to end the investigation and state publicly that the paper’s articles weren’t politically motivated.
Any such political aim could have run afoul of provisions in an immunity deal between America Media and the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan, which agreed last fall not to prosecute the company for campaign finance violations related to its payment in a “catch and kill” ploy to bury a story during Trump’s campaign about a relationship with a former Playboy model.
“If in my position I can’t stand up to this kind of extortion, how many people can?” Bezos wrote in a post on Medium that included exchanges between his team and American Media representatives. “Be assured, no real journalists ever propose anything like what is happening here: I will not report embarrassing information about you if you do X for me. And if you don’t do X quickly, I will report the embarrassing information.”
Whether the actions Bezos described constitute either extortion or blackmail under the law will be up to prosecutors to determine. Blackmail typically involves a threat to share embarrassing information, which wouldn’t ordinarily be illegal, in return for money or something else of value. Extortion involves seeking the same end through the threat of an illegal act, often physical violence.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office has declined to comment. A spokesman for AMI said the publisher “fervently believes” its actions were legal and said it was in “good faith” negotiations with Bezos at the time he made the claims. The emails published by the billionaire included suggestions by AMI that Bezos’ representatives had defamed the company with suggestions that its reporting was politically motivated.
A few years earlier, AMI CEO David Pecker directed his company to pay $150,000 to former Playboy model Karen McDougal for the rights to her story about a decadeold affair with Trump, which it never published, the government said in its nonprosecution agreement. In August 2015, Pecker offered to use the same tactics more broadly to help Trump’s campaign, prosecutors said.
Among the immunity deal’s provisions were requirements that AMI establish written standards for its executives and editorial employees on how federal election laws apply to its business and that it consult with attorneys to ensure payments for stories about anyone running for public office don’t violate those laws.
It was further conditioned on AMI committing “no crimes whatsoever,” a standard feature of such agreements.
“If prosecutors find that this exchange with Jeff Bezos was an additional crime, then they have the right to void the agreement,” said Robert Mintz, a former federal prosecutor now in private practice. “Watching your nonprosecution agreement with a cooperating witness fall apart is the last thing you want to see happen, because it creates a giant headache.”
Despite AMI’s statement of innocence, its board has “determined that it should promptly and thoroughly investigate the claims” and will take whatever action is necessary, a company spokesman said Friday.
