One of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s key witnesses on Tuesday appeared to blow up the prosecution’s main argument to convict former President Donald Trump of seeking to undermine the 2016 election.
On Monday, as the Tampa Free Press reported, Bragg’s team set the table in the alleged hush-money trial by asserting Trump’s payments to his former attorney Michael Cohen were part of a broader “conspiracy” to sway his first election.
According to prosecutors, the $130,000 paid to porn star Stormy Daniels resulted from three “catch and kill” deals that Trump and Cohen cut with former National Enquirer Publisher David Pecker to block publication of damaging stories about Trump’s alleged affair.
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The theory, such as it is, asserts that voters would have recoiled from Trump in an election year by news of an extramarital affair.
Yet, as the conservative website Trending Politics reported Tuesday, Pecker flipped the script on Bragg.
In what Trending Politics dubbed “a stunning turn of events,” Pecker “appears to have dealt a significant blow to the case” by unraveling the prosecution’s narrative.
Pecker told the court that he and Cohen — and not Trump — were the ones mostly concerned about stories of Trump’s history with women that could have torpedoed his presidential bid.
As the New York Post reported, “When describing the August 2015 meeting at Trump Tower, David Pecker said he warned Donald Trump that women would try to sell stories about him as his presidential campaign heated up.”
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“I was the person that thought that there would be a lot of women to come out try to sell their stories because Mr. Trump was well known as the most eligible bachelor and dated the most beautiful women,” Pecker testified. “It is my experience that when someone runs for office like this, it’s very common for these women to call the National Enquirer and try to sell their stories.”
“I said I would be your eyes and ears,” he continued, “and then I said that anything I hear in the marketplace, if I hear anything about women selling stories, I would notify Michael Cohen.”
As the Travis Media Group summarized Pecker’s testimony on X: “David Pecker just testified that he’s the one who told Trump women might come to him with stories, because Trump was such a popular bachelor who dated the most beautiful women.”
“Apparently, Trump was just planning a campaign run, but Pecker and Cohen were the ones worried about women coming forward,” the post continued. “Does the prosecution realize they just made themselves look ridiculous? Their key witness just said Trump didn’t even come up with any of this.”
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Pecker reportedly provided another example of how “catch and kill” worked.
He testified about contacting Cohen when an Enquirer editor got wind of a doorman at Trump Tower seeking to sell a tale that Trump fathered an illegitimate daughter with a maid at the building.
Pecker later determined that the story was bogus.
Still, after talking to Cohen, who said the story was “absolutely not true,” he told Cohen the Enquirer paid $30,000 to the doorman.
“I said I’ll pay for it, this is a very big story and it should be removed from the market,” Pecker testified, explaining his conversation with Cohen. Apparently, the doorman signed an agreement that he could be slapped with a $1 million lawsuit if he went public later on.
“I thought if the story was true … it would be probably the biggest story for the National Enquirer since the death of Elvis Presley,” Pecker testified. Yet it was never published, and the invoice was internally labeled as “regarding ‘Trump’ non-published story.”
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