Hush-Money Witness Unmasks Team Trump’s Shady Inner Workings

It seems Donald Trump didn’t want to leave any trace of certain conversations with a tabloid magnate just before the 2016 election.

During Trump’s hush-money trial on Tuesday, David Pecker, the former publisher of the National Enquirer and former CEO of its parent company, American Media Inc., revealed that Trump’s team very well knew what they were doing was shady. In fact, Pecker said, the president’s fixer and attorney in 2016, Michael Cohen, tried to steer conversations about payments off of the phone and onto an encrypted messaging app.

In conversations concerning Playboy model Karen McDougal, with whom Trump had an affair, Pecker said that Cohen sought to shift their conversations to Signal, an encrypted app with the ability to make messages disappear.

Trump faces 34 felony counts for allegedly paying off adult film actress Stormy Daniels to cover up an affair before the 2016 presidential election. At the time, Pecker was using his position in a “catch-and-kill” scheme to buy off anyone, like McDougal and Daniels, with any disparaging stories about Trump, he admitted earlier in court Tuesday.

Attempting to have conversations without a record is suspect, to say the least, and seems to indicate that Trump and his people knew that their activities were suspicious, if not outright illegal. It’s another strike for Trump’s defense team, which already has to deal with the impending playback of audio evidence where Trump himself discusses making payments to McDougal with Cohen “with cash.”

Effectively, Pecker confessed he was the “eyes and ears” for the Trump campaign regarding “women selling stories,” and he promised to notify Cohen in order to have such stories “killed.”

According to Pecker, Trump directly asked him what he and his magazines could do to help Trump’s campaign. The tabloid publisher responded that he could “publish positive stories about Trump” and “negative stories about his opponents.”

Republicans have started commenting on the Columbia University protests staged in support of Gaza—and unsurprisingly, the comments have been lackluster, punitive, and completely beside the point.

Columbia University and Barnard College students have been protesting for months against the war in Gaza, including setting up an encampment on campus last week. University officials and police have responded with arrests and disciplinary action, causing the protest, which sought to persuade the institutions to divest from weapons manufacturers and companies doing business with Israel, to spread across the country.

Fox News’s Maria Baritromo called the protests “barbaric” on Tuesday, drawing a completely inaccurate comparison. “And yet, you don’t see the upset that you saw around January 6,” she said, referring to the Capitol insurrection. 

Unlike the January 6 riots, there have been no reports of buildings being stormed, or law enforcement getting attacked. And contrary to accusations that the demonstration is inherently antisemitic, the protesters held Jewish Shabbat services over the weekend followed by Muslim evening prayers. 

David Frum, a senior editor at The Atlantic and former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, thought that protesters should lose their student loan forgiveness. Critics were quick to point out that he was effectively saying that poorer students shouldn’t be able to peacefully protest on campuses.  

Republican Senators Tom Cotton and Josh Hawley demanded that the National Guard be called in to subdue the peaceful protesters. Cotton referred to the protest as “nascent pogroms.”

Such comments are not out of character for these two. Cotton has practically made a career out of calling for violence against peaceful protests, including his infamous “send in the troops” op-ed during the 2020 to Black Lives Matter protests. Hawley, meanwhile, raised his fist right before the January 6 riot—only to be seen running scared through the Capitol once the mob breached the building. 

Meanwhile, in Gaza, mass graves are being discovered, and the death toll keeps rising even as it becomes harder to count. Student protests continue to spread, not just in the U.S., but even overseas. But the discourse in the United States seems to be over offensive language and not offensive military aid, which continues to get majority votes in Congress. 

A longtime friend of Donald Trump’s admitted on the stand Tuesday that their relationship had devolved into an orchestrated scheme to influence the 2016 election on Trump’s behalf.

David Pecker, the former publisher of the National Enquirer and former CEO of its parent company, American Media Inc., told the court Tuesday that he and Trump had coordinated not just to publish positive coverage of his friend ahead of the 2016 election, but also to publish negative coverage of other presidential candidates. In doing so, Pecker practically admitted to the catch-and-kill media scheme that Trump has repeatedly denied.

Trump had asked “what can I do and what my magazines can do to help the campaign,” Pecker said. Pecker had responded that he could “publish positive stories about Trump” and “negative stories about his opponents.”

Stories about Hillary Clinton were already popular amongst the Enquirer’s audience, so continuing to publish those articles was a “mutual benefit,” according to Pecker. Still, Pecker knew the plan should be kept “highly, highly confidential,” describing the undocumented meeting he had with Trump and Trump’s then-fixer Michael Cohen in August 2015 as “just an agreement among friends.” Pecker would later tell the Enquirer’s former editor-in-chief, Dylan Howard, to instruct the east and west coast bureau chiefs of the publication to redirect any stories about Trump to Pecker.

“We’re gonna try to help the campaign, and to do that I want to keep this as quiet as possible,” Pecker recalled telling Howard.

That, effectively, made Pecker the “eyes and ears” for the Trump campaign regarding “women selling stories.” Pecker promised to notify Cohen in order to have such stories “killed.”

Trump is accused of using Cohen to sweep an affair with porn star Stormy Daniels under the rug ahead of the 2016 presidential election. He faces 34 felony charges in this case for allegedly falsifying business records with the intent to further an underlying crime. Trump has pleaded not guilty on all counts.

Donald Trump claimed that a massive police presence has shut down traffic for blocks around the Manhattan courthouse where his hush-money trial is being held, preventing his supporters from showing their support and protesting on his behalf. But reality looks a little different.

NBC News reporter Vaughn Hillyard posted a video outside the courthouse Tuesday morning. The clip shows a pretty quiet street fully open to traffic, with only one Trump supporter there, according to Hillyard.

Either Trump has no idea what’s going outside of court, he’s deluding himself, or he’s trying to make excuses about a poor show of support. It’s not the first time, either: When the former president was initially indicted in his hush-money case in March 2023, the show of support outside of the court was abysmal, with trolls and media outnumbering supporters. When he was charged with 34 felony counts in the following month, news crews again dwarfed the MAGA faithful.

Trump clearly is hoping for January 6-level turnout at his trials, even calling for his supporters to show up in large numbers. But it seems he’s going to be repeatedly disappointed. Many Republicans, clinging to conspiracies about the Capitol riot, think that the government was behind the whole thing, and don’t want to play into a “deep state” plot.

But that hasn’t stopped Trump from continuing to urge his supporters to show up—something that might not bode all that well for the presidential election in November.

An attorney for Donald Trump’s legal defense in his New York criminal trial took a serious misstep on Tuesday that resulted in a critical warning from Judge Juan Merchan.

On the second day of the trial, attorney Todd Blanche attempted to portray Trump as an individual fully aware of the limitations of the partial gag order imposed on him in the trial, which forbids him from speaking publicly about courtroom staff, prosecutors, or any of their family members. Comments about jurors are also prohibited, as well as comments about witnesses, though comments about Merchan and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg are still on the table.

Still, Trump has already managed to violate the gag order about a dozen times, according to the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office.

“President Trump does in fact know what the gag order allows him to do and what it does not allow him to do,” Blanche told the court, insisting that his client had not violated the court order since Trump’s comments toward witnesses, including adult film actress Stormy Daniels and his former fixer Michael Cohen, allegedly came after they had spoken about him first.

“He’s allowed to respond to political attacks, your honor,” Blanche said, according to MSNBC’s Adam Klasfled.

But Merchan remembered the order of events, reminding Blanche that Trump’s disparaging remarks had in fact come before the others’.

“President Trump ‘Truths’ repeatedly, all day, virtually seven days a week, your honor,” Blanche replied.

The ensuing back-and-forth between Blanche and Merchan continued to a rolling boil until Blanche suddenly claimed that the violations at hand—which involve Trump “reposting an article from a news site” or a “news program”—don’t actually violate the order. Still, Blanche had no precedent or case law to support such a claim.

“I don’t have any case law,” Blanche said, instead calling it “common sense” and doubling down that Trump had been “very careful to comply” with the order.

That was, apparently, the straw that broke the camel’s back, after which Merchan dropped that the attorney had gone too far.

“Mr. Blanche, you are losing all credibility with the court,” Merchan said, according to LawFare’s Anna Bower.

“You say the posts are ambiguous, you say he didn’t know, but you’re not offering me anything to support your argument. You’re not giving me anything to hang my hat on,” Merchan continued.

“The fact that the prosecution did not come running in here as [soon] as your client posted things too close to the line is not probative of anything here,” he added before telling the court to take a break.