...let's do it.
Shortly after the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner was handed a task considered critical to the president’s operations. In addition to serving as a senior adviser in the White House, he would also be playing the role of the main conduit between Trump and his friend David Pecker, the National Enquirer publisher and chief executive of AMI, which prosecutors said on Wednesday admitted to making a $150,000 hush-money payment “in concert with” the Trump campaign.
[...]
[B]efore Kushner was his main conduit, that role was played by Michael Cohen, the president’s former attorney and fixer.
During the heat of the 2016 election, Pecker’s AMI and
Enquirer—with Cohen helping facilitate matters behind the scenes—endorsed Trump, ran a catch-and-kill operation to suppress damaging stories of Trump’s alleged affairs, and published numerous negative articles on Trump’s political enemies and adversaries in the Republican primary. Trump himself used to contribute to the
Enquirer and the future president reportedly also used the tabloid to settle his pettier, more personal scores. In late 2016, actress Salma Hayek claimed on a conference call hosted by the Hillary Clinton campaign that Trump had tried to date her and when she rejected him, he planted a false story about her in the
Enquirer.
Daily Beast
What a swell guy.
[Kushner] was an easy choice [for Pecker], given that the two men had a preexisting relationship. Two people with direct knowledge of their acquaintance say that Kushner and Pecker got to know each other years before Trump’s election, when Pecker was thinking about forging a business relationship with Kushner, who at the time owned The New York Observer.
[...]
In July 2017 [...] Pecker visited both Trump and Kushner at the White House, bringing along with him Kacy Grine, a French businessman with ties to the Saudi business elite and royal family.
[...]
Soon after the feds raided Cohen’s office—which started a chain reaction leading to Cohen turning against Trump and fingering him as an unindicted co-conspirator—Pecker and the Enquirer’s top brass made a calculated decision to begin tiptoeing away from the president, and to cease featuring their usual glut of pro-Trump coverage.
[...]
“This is beyond the scope of David Pecker's collusion or cooperation in snuffing out bad stories,” said Jerry George, a former Enquirer Los Angeles bureau chief and assistant managing editor of all the AMI titles. “It goes to the core of Trumpworld."
At the core of Trumpworld: Jared Kushner and the Trump clan.
No comments:
Post a Comment