NEW YORK — Defense attorneys in Donald Trump’s hush money trial are poised to delve into an account of the former publisher of the National Enquirer and his efforts to shield Trump from negative stories during the 2016 election.
David Pecker will return to the witness stand for a fourth day as lawyers try to poke holes in his testimony, which describes helping bury embarrassing stories that Trump feared could harm his campaign.
Pecker has so far painted a tawdry portrait of “catch and kill” gossip fraud: picking up a potentially damaging story by buying the rights to it and then killing it through deals that prevent the paid person from telling the story to anyone else .
The cross-examination, which began Thursday, will last a week in the criminal cases facing the former president as he battles to reclaim the White House in November.
The indictment concerns $130,000 in payments Trump’s company made to his then-lawyer Michael Cohen. He paid that amount on behalf of Trump to prevent porn actor Stormy Daniels from making public her claims about a sexual encounter with Trump ten years earlier. Trump has denied the meeting ever took place.
Prosecutors say Trump obscured the true nature of those payments and falsely recorded them as legal fees. He has pleaded not guilty to 34 counts of falsifying company records.
The case is the first-ever criminal trial of a former US president and the first of four prosecutions against Trump to reach a jury.
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Here’s the latest:
Even by National Enquirer standards, former publisher David Pecker’s testimony at Donald Trump’s hush money trial this week exposed an astonishing level of corruption at America’s best-known tabloid and may one day be seen as the moment when this actually went down.
“It just has no credibility whatsoever,” said Lachlan Cartwright, editor-in-chief of the Enquirer from 2014 to 2017. “Whatever credibility it had was completely damaged by what happened in court this week.”
On Thursday, Pecker was back on the witness stand to talk more about the arrangement he made to boost Trump’s 2016 presidential candidacy, take down his rivals and silence any revelations that may have damaged him.
A change in the court schedule means Donald Trump will not be forced off the campaign trail next week to attend a hearing in his hush money criminal case in New York.
Judge Juan M. Merchan moved a hearing on the former president’s alleged violations of the gag order to next Thursday, to avoid a conflict with his planned campaign events next Wednesday.
Merchan initially set the hearing for next Wednesday, the trial’s regular day off. Trump will hold campaign events in Michigan and Wisconsin that day. His lawyers have urged the judge not to hold proceedings on Wednesday so he can campaign.
The hearing – now scheduled for next Thursday, May 2 at 9:30 a.m. – concerns a request by the prosecutor to punish Trump for violating his silence order on four separate occasions this week.
The order prohibits Trump from making comments about witnesses and others involved in the case. Merchan is already considering holding Trump in contempt of court and fining him up to $10,000 for other alleged violations of the gag order.