The National Enquirer is dishing dirt, agreeing to tell prosecutors everything it knows about Donald Trump — and it might know a lot.
In a court document released today, the tabloid publisher, American Media Inc., admitted to coordinating a hush-money payment with Trump’s 2016 campaign, reversing two years of denials.
The confession came as part of an immunity agreement with the U.S. attorney’s office in New York, made public shortly after Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, was sentenced to three years in prison over charges of tax fraud, campaign finance violations and lying to Congress.
But the disclosure might just be scratching the surface.
Based on court documents and a plethora of media reports, Trump and his aides have worked for years with the tabloid to kill incriminating stories.
AMI’s CEO David Pecker also had a decades-long copacetic friendship with Trump.
Legal experts say that could mean more legal peril for Trump, who has already been implicated in directing Cohen to work with the National Enquirer during the 2016 campaign to pay women in exchange for their silence about alleged affairs.
The immunity deal, said Gene Rossi, a former federal prosecutor from Northern Virginia, “is a huge red flag and loud gong against the president.”
Under the agreement dated from late September and released Wednesday, AMI accepted immunity from federal prosecutors in exchange for documents and “numerous interviews” with the company’s executives and staff about the Trump hush-money scheme and other arrangements involving politicians running for office.
As part of the deal, the tabloid publisher acknowledged a series of “admitted facts” tied to its work with the Trump campaign to ensure damaging allegations about the real estate mogul didn’t come out before Election Day 2016.
The arrangement — which involved Pecker, Cohen and one other member of Trump’s campaign — stretched back to August 2014, according to a separate court filing on Friday.
In the document released Wednesday, AMI confirmed that it paid a woman $150,000 in “cooperation, consultation and concert” with Trump’s campaign to ensure she “did not publicize damaging allegations about that candidate before the 2016 presidential election and thereby influence the election.”
The admission marked a dramatic about-face for the company, which had previously denied making that exact same payment to Karen McDougal, the 1998 Playboy Playmate of the Year, when the Wall Street Journal first disclosed the pay-off in a story published four days before the 2016 election.
The non-prosecution agreement, according to several legal experts, strongly suggests there is additional corroboration of the crimes Cohen has already pleaded guilty to involving the president.
It also suggests Pecker and others at AMI “may provide support for the allegation that the president willfully and knowingly joined a conspiracy to violate the campaign laws as well as possible tax crimes committed by AMI,” Rossi said.
Barbara McQuade, a former U.S. Attorney from Michigan, said the immunity deal “suggests that witnesses other than Cohen are providing information to special counsel Robert Mueller about Trump.”
“A corporation can act only through its officers and employees, so one or more officers or employees of AMI appear to be providing information to Mueller about the payoffs at issue,” she added. “This could mean that additional subjects could be charged, including Trump, for conspiracy or solicitation of a campaign finance violation.”
Still, by any measure, Pecker is primed to be a gold mine for prosecutors.
The 67-year-old New York native has known Trump for more than two decades, and media accounts and statements from the two men over the years show it’s been a mutually beneficial relationship.
Before Trump entered presidential politics, Vanity Fair reported that Pecker regularly flew on Trump’s plane from New York to Florida.
A former AMI editor once told CNN that Pecker had “a favor bank” to quash negative stories about Trump.
“It’s sort of a favor bank where he can say to the president — I have an arsenal of stories that I have kept out of print, so these scandals never saw the light of day,” the editor said.
Once in the White House, Trump hosted a July 2017 dinner for Pecker and his guest, a French businessman with ties to the royal family in Saudi Arabia, according to The New York Times.
At the time, the newspaper reported that Pecker was trying to expand his media and events businesses in Saudi Arabia.
The National Enquirer has returned the favor with frequent flattering coverage for Trump as he’s flirted with political runs.
The National Enquirer worked with the Trump campaign in 2016, accusing Hillary Clinton of lying, corruption and being so sick that she would die in six months.