12/13/118
On Wednesday, while the political world was focused on the news that former Trump lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen had been sentenced to three years in prison for a variety of crimes, something else of potentially huge import got somewhat glossed over: American Media Inc., the parent company of the National Enquirer, admitted it had helped facilitate a hush payment to former Playboy model Karen McDougal and agreed to cooperate with the ongoing investigation being run by the Southern District of New York. That is a VERY big deal for two major reasons. First, AMI admitted that, in coordination with Trump's presidential campaign, it had paid McDougal $150,000 in the run-up to the election for the exclusive rights to her story that she had an affair with Donald Trump a decade earlier. Here's the exact wording from the SDNY press release on Wednesday;
- "AMI admitted that it made the $150,000 payment in concert with a candidate's presidential campaign, and in order to ensure that the woman did not publicize damaging allegations about the candidate before the 2016 presidential election."
So, AMI is acknowledging for the first time that not only did it make the payment to McDougal, which it has long lied about publicly, but it also did so in concert with Trump's campaign.
The AMI settlement jibes with what we learned last week in the SDNY sentencing document on Cohen, in which the office makes clear they believe that Cohen made and sought to hide the payment to McDougal (as well as another six-figure payment to porn actress Stormy Daniels) at the direction and coordination of Trump.
Perhaps the most important thing that the AMI settlement does, however, is make clear that the payment and the coordination with the Trump campaign was, according to the SDNY release, done by AMI
"to suppress the woman's story so as to prevent it from influencing the election." That's of critical import, because Trump's latest argument is that while Daniels and McDougal were clearly paid off -- remember that he has long denied that -- it had nothing to do with his campaign or his prospects of winning. AMI is admitting in their settlement deal that the goal of catching and killing McDougal's story was "to prevent it from influencing the election." Which means that the $150,000 amounted to an in-kind contribution to the campaign -- and broke campaign finance law. In short: We may look back on Wednesday -- when this is all said and done -- as not the day that Michael Cohen got sentenced, but rather the day that AMI started working with the feds.