I guess it's not unprecedented for a publication to hide damaging information about a politician it supports. But I'm pretty sure it isn't common for the politician to pay them to keep it hidden. Maybe I'm wrong, but I've never heard of that before:
Federal investigators have provided ample evidence that President Trump was involved in deals to pay two women to keep them from speaking publicly before the 2016 election about affairs that they said they had with him.
But it turns out that Mr. Trump wanted to go even further.
He and his lawyer at the time, Michael D. Cohen, devised a plan to buy up all the dirt on Mr. Trump that the National Enquirer and its parent company had collected on him, dating back to the 1980s, according to several of Mr. Trump’s associates.
The existence of the plan, which was never finalized, has not been reported before. But it was strongly hinted at in a recording that Mr. Cohen’s lawyer released last month of a conversation about payoffs that Mr. Cohen had with Mr. Trump.
“It’s all the stuff — all the stuff, because you never know,” Mr. Cohen said on the recording.
The move by Mr. Trump and Mr. Cohen indicated just how concerned they were about all the information amassed by the company, American Media, and its chairman, David Pecker, a loyal Trump ally of two decades who has cooperated with investigators.
It is not clear yet whether the proposed plan to purchase all the information from American Media has attracted the interest of federal prosecutors in New York, who last week obtained a guilty plea from Mr. Cohen over a $130,000 payment to the adult film actress Stephanie Clifford, also known as Stormy Daniels, and a $150,000 payment to a Playboy model, Karen McDougal.
But the prosecutors have provided at least partial immunity to Mr. Pecker, who is a key witness in their inquiry into payments made on behalf of Mr. Trump during the 2016 campaign.
The people who knew about the discussions would speak about them only on condition of anonymity, given that they are now the potential subject of a federal investigation that did not end with Mr. Cohen’s plea.
Lawyers for Mr. Trump and Mr. Cohen declined to comment for this article as did American Media.
It is not known how much of the material on Mr. Trump is still in American Media’s possession or whether American Media destroyed any of it after the campaign. Prosecutors have not said whether they have obtained any of the material beyond that which pertains to Ms. McDougal and Ms. Clifford and the discussions about their arrangements.
For the better part of two decades, Mr. Pecker had ordered his staff at American Media to protect Mr. Trump from troublesome stories, in some cases by buying up stories about him and filing them away.
In 2016, he kept his staff from going back through the old Trump tip and story files that dated to before Mr. Pecker became company chairman in 1999, several former staff members said in interviews with The New York Times.
That meant that American Media, the nation’s largest gossip publisher, did not play a role during the election year in vetting a presidential candidacy — Mr. Trump’s — made for the tabloids.
I think the most significant aspect of this story is the fact that the tape we've all heard may be referring to a much bigger transaction than the Stormy Daniels payment.
I have no idea if the feds are following up on this. It wouldn't surprise me if they aren't doing much. There's good reason to think the SDNY may not be quite the crusaders we think they are. But it certainly seems like a fertile field for investigation.
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