Joy Reid Says David Pecker ‘Idolized’ Trump and Making the Catch and Kill National Enquirer Deal Was a ‘Total Win-Win’ | Video
MSNBC’s Joy Reid was inside the lower Manhattan courthouse Tuesday as the sixth day of Donald Trump’s hush money criminal trial rolled out.
On that evening’s “The ReidOut,” the journalist and host reviewed what happened inside those walls, which included testimony from former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker. As Reid put it, Pecker “seems to have almost idolized Donald Trump” and that making the so-called catch and kill deal with his team was “a total win-win” for the paper.
“[Pecker] described him as someone Americans respected as the boss on ‘The Apprentice,’ which was also the way Michael Cohen referred to Trump,” Reid explained, nodding to the former president’s ex-fixer. “Pecker said the Trump covers were consistently the National Enquirer’s best sellers. The other covers that sold a lot of Enquirer magazines on the supermarket newsstands [were] covers featuring stories about Bill Clinton’s womanizing and Hillary Clinton enabling him.”
Pecker, who owned American Medic Inc., also described the deal he made with Cohen to only publish positive stories about Trump ahead of his 2016 presidential run — and negative stories about his political rivals — was a “win-win.” As a result, Reid said, “Pecker was personally invited by Cohen to Trump’s presidential announcement in Trump Tower, and he hoped to financially benefit from how many magazines the pro-Trump and anti-Trump competitor issues would sell.”
The relationship between Pecker and Cohen deepened at that point, Reid continued, and Pecker described himself as having been “in constant communication with Michael Cohen” from then on “as Pecker and a small group of AMI editors kept their eyes and ears peeled for stories that could be damaging to Trump so they could catch them and kill them before they were published anywhere else, at least before the election.”
As a result, the prosecutor “walked David Pecker through the deals that they cut with Dino Sajudin, the doorman who claimed to have information about a Trump love child with his Hispanic former housekeeper, which Pecker paid $30,000 for” despite the fact that his team knew the story was not true.
The host argued that Pecker’s testimony effectively set the stage for future testimony for Cohen and others.
Watch the segment from “The ReidOut” in the video above.
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