David Pecker, the former publisher of the National Enquirer, returned to the witness stand on Tuesday as a witness for the prosecution and explained to jurors how he coordinated with Donald Trump and his team to bury scandals about the then candidate during the 2016 campaign.
Pecker laid out how he'd repeatedly paid to purchase stories about Trump's alleged marital infidelities before keeping them from reaching the light of day – a scheme known as "catch-and-kill" that prosecutors claim Trump illegally falsified business records to conceal in order to help his presidential campaign.
Pecker said he had a "great relationship" with Trump that dated back to the late 1980s – then spent the next hours of testimony damning him with not-so-faint praise.
Pecker described Trump as "very knowledgeable", "very detail-oriented", "very cautious and very frugal", and "almost a micromanager" in his business dealings. Those complimentary descriptions hurt Trump because prosecutors need to prove that Trump had direct knowledge of the scheme to pay his attorney Michael Cohen back for his payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels by falsely labeling them as business expenses.
Pecker then discussed a 2015 meeting he had at Trump Tower with Trump, Cohen and Hope Hicks, a top Trump campaign official, where they asked him what he could do "to help the campaign".
He promised to be the campaign's "eyes and ears" to find out about "women selling stories" about Trump, and work to kill them, because Trump was "well known as the most eligible bachelor and dated the most beautiful women" (another unhelpful compliment for Trump, who had been married to his third wife, Melania, for a decade at that point). He then testified that he routinely coordinated with Cohen at Trump's behest to run negative stories about Trump's political foes. It's a misdemeanor under New York law to conspire to promote the election of someone by unlawful means.
Pecker then walked through two schemes to catch and kill those stories. The first was paying Trump Tower doorman Dino Sajudin $30,000 for the rights to a story about Trump fathering a child with a maid who worked in the building. When Pecker told Cohen the Enquirer would pay the fee itself (even though he didn't plan to run the story), he said Cohen told him "the boss would be very pleased".
Pecker then testified that he bought the rights to the story of Karen McDougal, a former model who claims she had an affair with Trump.
Pecker said Trump called him once about McDougal, but that most of his interactions were with Cohen.
"Michael was very agitated – it looked like he was getting a lot of pressure," Pecker said shortly before court adjourned for the day.
Pecker will return to the witness stand when the trial resumes on Thursday. He'll likely finish testifying about McDougal and move on to explain his role in connecting Trump's team to Stormy Daniels.
