NEW YORK — A veteran tabloid publisher testified Tuesday that he pledged to be Donald Trump ‘s “eyes and ears” during his 2016 presidential campaign, recounting how he promised the then-candidate that he would help suppress harmful stories and even arranged to purchase the silence of a doorman.
The testimony from David Pecker was designed to bolster the prosecution’s premise of a decades-long friendship between Trump and the former publisher of the National Enquirer that culminated in an agreement to give the candidate’s lawyer a heads-up on negative tips and stories so they could be quashed.
The effort was a way to illegally influence the election, prosecutors have alleged in striving to elevate the gravity of the history-making first trial of a former American president and the first of four criminal cases against Trump to reach a jury. The presumptive Republican presidential nominee in this year’s race faces 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in connection with hush money payments meant to stifle embarrassing stories from surfacing in the final days of the 2016 campaign.
With Trump sitting just feet away in the courtroom, Pecker, the first witness, detailed his behind-the-scenes role in Trump’s rise from political novice to the Republican nomination and the White House. He explained how he and the National Enquirer parlayed rumor-mongering into splashy tabloid stories that smeared Trump’s opponents and, just as crucially, leveraged his connections to suppress seamy stories about Trump, including a porn actor’s claim of an extramarital sexual encounter years earlier.
Pecker traced the origins of their relationship to a 1980s meeting at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, and said the friendship bloomed alongside the success of the real estate developer’s TV show “The Apprentice” and the program’s subsequent celebrity version.
Their ties were solidified during a pivotal August 2015 meeting at Trump Tower involving Trump, his lawyer and personal fixer Michael Cohen, and another aide, Hope Hicks, in which Pecker was asked what he and the publications he led could do for the campaign.
Pecker said he volunteered to publish positive stories about Trump and negative stories about his opponents. But that wasn’t all, he said, telling jurors how he told Trump: “I will be your eyes and ears.”
“I said that anything I hear in the marketplace, if I hear anything negative about yourself, or if I hear anything about women selling stories, I would notify Michael Cohen,” so that the rights could be purchased and the stories could be killed.
“So that they would not get published, you mean?” asked prosecutor Joshua Steinglass.
“So that they would not get published, yes” Pecker replied.
To illustrate their point, prosecutors displayed a screenshot of various flattering headlines the National Enquirer published about Trump, including “Donald Dominates!’ and “World Exclusive: The Donald Trump Nobody Knows.” The jury was also shown disparaging and outlandish stories about Trump’s opponents, including surgeon Ben Carson and Republican Sen. Marco Rubio.
Pecker painted Cohen as a shadow editor of the National Enquirer’s pro-Trump coverage, directing the tabloid to go after whichever Republican candidate was gaining momentum.
“I would receive a call from Michael Cohen, and he would direct me and direct Dylan Howard on which candidate and which direction we should go,” Pecker said, referring to the tabloid’s then-editor.
Pecker said he underscored to Howard that the agreement with the Trump operation was “highly, highly confidential.”
“I did not want anyone else to know about this agreement I had and what I wanted to do,” the ex-publisher added.