Trump ‘Covered Up’ Cheating On Melania With Help From…

It has been noted that Tapper then turned to his panel and noted “an important exchange as the prosecution questioned tabloid magnate David Pecker today. The prosecutor said, quote, ‘Prior to the August 2015 meeting, had you ever purchased a story to not print it about Mr. Trump?’ And pecker replied, ‘Ah, no.’ The prosecutor asked, did that part help the National Enquirer at all and not publishing a story that you paid for? Pecker said, ‘No, that didn’t help.’”

“So, Pecker is confirming here that positive stories about Trump are of mutual benefit. Or even potentially, I guess, theoretically negative ones would be a benefit for the National Enquirer, but stopping stories from being printed about Donald Trump would only benefit Trump. It would not help the National Enquirer. How important is it?” Tapper asked CNN legal analyst Elliot Williams.

“Nothing illegal about it. Nothing stops the National Enquirer from running positive stories about whoever they want to run stories about,” Williams replied, adding:

Now, at the center of this case is this catch-and-kill scheme and falsifying records to cover up some of the details in some of these articles, you have to establish that there was a pattern of suppressing stories that were unfavorable to Trump and pumping up stories that were favorable to him in order to get to the point where you’re talking about, you know, hiding business records to cover up what they’re doing. So really, what they’re doing is laying the groundwork for what should come out if the prosecutors, get the testimony they want, which is that these business records were falsified in order to protect the president and help the campaign.

Later in the discussion, former Manhattan prosecutor Adam Kaufmann added, “One of the key things we have to focus on is not that what the Enquirer was doing with the catch and kill. You know, when you get down to the center of the crime, it’s about the payment for it and the use of funds and whether that’s a campaign violation, that’s what makes this transforms this from a misdemeanor to a felony.”

“And so the catch and kill, the idea that a newspaper would cover certain stories, not cover other stories. As Eliot said, that’s fine. Not a crime. What we have to focus on. And this is all the groundwork. We have to focus on the business records, and whether there were false entries in the business records. And then as the next step, did those payments constitute a campaign violation, a federal campaign violation that they were covering up? So it’s not, you know, to say, election interference, election interference. It’s sort of not quite accurate for what the case is truly about, which is the payments. The payments were illegal and the records were falsified to cover that up,” Kaufmann concluded.