Pecker says he was told 'the boss will be very pleased' after paying $30,000 for doorman story
Victoria Bekiempis
Ultimately, David Pecker decided to broker an agreement with Dino Sajudin, the former Trump Tower doorman.
“How did that come about?” Prosecutor Joshua Steinglass asked.
“I asked Dylan to negotiate a price a number, to buy the story and take it off the market,” Pecker said.
Dylan went ahead and there was two parts to this. The first part was our normal procedures is we have the source, the tipster, take a polygraph test…
“Please don’t tell us any polygraph results,” Steinglass warned. “We pursued the story,” Pecker said.
“Did you discuss the purchase of the story with Michael Cohen?" Pecker recounted:
I called Michael Cohen and I said that, ‘we have to go forward with the story’. He said, ‘how much?’ Dylan negotiated a price of $30,000. He said, ‘who’s going to pay for it?’ I said, ‘I’ll pay for it.’
This could be a very good story, I believe that it’s important that it should be removed from the market. And then he said thank you very much, thanked me, and he said the boss would be very pleased.
Steinglass asked Pecker who he thought “the boss” was. “The boss would be Donald Trump,” Pecker said.
Donald Trump sat for the second day of witness testimony in court in Manhattan on Tuesday in his criminal trial. Here’s a recap of what happened:
Judge Juan Merchan held off on deciding whether Trump should be fined $10,000 for attacking expected trial witnesses in direct violation of a gag order designed to protect trial participants from being the target of Trump’s abuse.
Merchan subjected Trump to a gag order before the trial began, covering prosecutors (but not the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg), witnesses, court employees, jurors and their families. Before the trial, Merchan then extended the gag order to cover his own family and Bragg’s family. Trump remains free to criticize Merchan himself, though doing so would be unlikely to win any favors from the judge, who will decide Trump’s sentence should the jury find him guilty.
Judge Merchan reserved ruling from the bench on Tuesday, but he appeared deeply unconvinced by arguments from Trump’s lead lawyer Todd Blanche that a series of social media posts were just responses to political attacks on Trump and therefore permitted. “Mr Blanche, you’re losing all credibility,” Merchan said.
David Pecker, Trump’s longtime ally and former publisher of the National Enquirer, was on the stand again as a prosecution witness following a brief appearance on Monday after opening statements.
Pecker told the court about being invited to a meeting with Trump and his then lawyer, Michael Cohen, in New York in 2015 after Trump had just declared his candidacy for president and was seeking a friendly and powerful media insider. “I said what I would do is I would run or publish positive stories about Mr Trump and I would publish negative stories about his opponents, and I said that I would also be the eyes and ears,” Pecker told jurors.
Pecker said he had a “great relationship” with Trump over the years and considered him a “friend”, describing the former president as “very detail oriented … almost micromanaging”.
Pecker discussed the first of three “catch and kill” schemes, involving negative stories for Trump that prosecutors allege he suppressed to help his campaign. The first involved a former Trump Tower doorman, Dino Sajudin, who alleged that Trump fathered illegitimate children. Pecker testified that he negotiated to pay $30,000 for the story, and that Cohen told him that “the boss”, referring to Trump, was “very pleased”. The story turned out not to be true, Pecker said.
Pecker also began to discuss Karen McDougal, a Playboy model who alleged that she had an affair with Trump. McDougal is expected to take the witness stand during this trial.
Trump spoke to the media outside the courtroom, where he rallied against pro-Palestinian protests happening in various US college campuses.
The court adjourned early at 2pm ET for the Passover holiday. Pecker is expected to testify further when the trial resumes on Thursday.
The jury has walked out, and David Pecker has left the witness stand.
Before finishing his testimony for the day, Pecker said that Trump had called him at one point to ask about Karen McDougal, but that he communicated with Cohen all the other times.
As for Cohen’s demeanor? Pecker said:
Michael was very agitated – it looked like he was getting a lot of pressure.
And we’re on to another sex scandal-in-waiting. “Do you know of somebody named Karen McDougal?” Steinglass asked. “Yes, I do,” said David Pecker.
“Who is Karen McDougal?" “Karen McDougal was a Playboy model,” Pecker said.
“How did you first hear of her?" Pecker replied:
Dylan came to me in early June of 2016 and said that he received a call from one of his major sources, in California, that there’s a Playboy model who is trying to sell a story about a relationship that she had with Donald Trump for a year.
”What kind of relationship?” “Uh, romantic relationship,” Pecker said.
What did Pecker do?
I called Michael Cohen and I told Michael Cohen exactly what Dylan told me about this Playboy mode and that she had a relationship, I didn’t finish the conversation when he said that’s not true, absolutely untrue. I said just wait a second, this is a little different, I think we should vet this story out first. Michael Cohen said ‘yes, I think that’s a good idea.’
Prosecutor Joshua Steinglass’ continued questioning of David Pecker on this is further building the foundation for prosecution claims that the catch-and-kill scheme was meant to protect the campaign.
Even after discovering that Trump Tower doorman Dino Sajudin’s story was false, Pecker said, Michael Cohen didn’t want the tabloid head to release him from the $30,000 source agreement that barred him from discussing or shopping the story with any other outlet.
“I told Michael Cohen the story was not true, I told him that the doorman was very difficult to deal with, I mentioned to him that he was probably going t try to shop the story to someone else” but that they shouldn’t have concerns, and should just release him. Pecker continued:
Michael Cohen said, first he didn’t understand why I would ever release him, and then I said that to have him locked into us, it’s only going to cause [us] problems.
“He said when,” Pecker recalled. “I said I’d like to release him now. And he said ‘not until after the election.’”
In December 2016, Sajudin received an email indicating that he was released from their agreement.
David Pecker said he had a second conversation with Michael Cohen about Trump Tower doorman Dino Sajudin’s story.
Cohen said the story was absolutely not true. He said that Mr Trump would take a DNA test, that he is German-Irish and this woman is hispanic, and it’s absolutely impossible. And I told Michael Cohen that won’t be necessary, we’ll vet the story.
“So let me be clear about something, prior to this arrangement to purchase this story from Dino Sajudin, had you ever paid a source to kill a story about Donald Trump?” Steinglas asked. Pecker replied: “No, I did not."
“What was the reason that you were willing to pay for this story at this point?” Steinglass pressed. Pecker replied:
I had a number of reasons one, I thought it was very important that [Sajudin] wouldn’t be shopping the story to other media outlets. Part two, if the story was true, and I published it, it would be probably the biggest sale of the National Enquirer since the death of Elvis Presley.
“Did you have any intention of publishing it at the time that you negotiated this deal?" “At that time, no,” Pecker said.
Pecker says he was told 'the boss will be very pleased' after paying $30,000 for doorman story
Victoria Bekiempis
Ultimately, David Pecker decided to broker an agreement with Dino Sajudin, the former Trump Tower doorman.
“How did that come about?” Prosecutor Joshua Steinglass asked.
“I asked Dylan to negotiate a price a number, to buy the story and take it off the market,” Pecker said.
Dylan went ahead and there was two parts to this. The first part was our normal procedures is we have the source, the tipster, take a polygraph test…
“Please don’t tell us any polygraph results,” Steinglass warned. “We pursued the story,” Pecker said.
“Did you discuss the purchase of the story with Michael Cohen?" Pecker recounted:
I called Michael Cohen and I said that, ‘we have to go forward with the story’. He said, ‘how much?’ Dylan negotiated a price of $30,000. He said, ‘who’s going to pay for it?’ I said, ‘I’ll pay for it.’
This could be a very good story, I believe that it’s important that it should be removed from the market. And then he said thank you very much, thanked me, and he said the boss would be very pleased.
Steinglass asked Pecker who he thought “the boss” was. “The boss would be Donald Trump,” Pecker said.
We’re now moving into nitty gritty of specific catch-and-kill efforts.
“Does the name Dino Sajudin mean anything to you?” Prosecutor Joshua Steinglass asked. “Dino Sajudin was a doorman at Trump Tower.”
David Pecker said Dylan Howard, the National Enquirer editor-in-chief at the helm during the alleged hush-money schemes, apprised him that Sajudin was trying to sell a story “that Donald Turmp fathered an illegitimate girl with a maid at Trump Tower and the maid worked in Mr. Trump’s penthouse.”
Pecker said, “I called Michael Cohen and I described to him exactly what I was told by Dylan,” in keeping with his agreement with Trump.
Cohen insisted the account was “absolutely not true, but I’ll check it out,” Pecker also testified.
The court has just resumed after taking a short break, and David Pecker is returning to the witness stand.
Donald Trump was seen leaving the courtroom earlier at the start of the break, and did not wave or respond to shouted questions from reporters.
Donald Trump leaves the courtroom during his trial for allegedly covering up hush money payments at Manhattan Criminal Court on 23 April 2024 in New York City. Photograph: Getty Images
Prosecutor Joshua Steinglass is now running through Enquirer articles which were in keeping with the alleged Trump-Cohen agreement.
One headline about a political opponent, featuring a photo of a girl with an uneven mouth, stated, “Bungling Surgeon Ben Carson Left Sponge in Patient’s Brain.”
Steinglass asked:
Were these headlines run in accordance with your agreement you had struck at Trump Tower in August 2015 with Mr Trump and Michael Cohen?.
“Yes,” David Pecker said.
Steinglass pointed to another example. “Ted Cruz Shamed by Porn Star” with a photo of a buxom blonde.
We would communicate what we were doing and the direction of the article with Michael Cohen and we would also send him the PDFs of the story before it was published so [they] could see the direction they were going and he would comment on them.
Pecker says Cohen would ask him to run negative stories on Trump's political opponents
Victoria Bekiempis
David Pecker is saying that during the campaign, Michael Cohen would call him and said “we would like you to run a negative article” on a political opponent, such as Ted Cruz, or Ben Carson, or Marco Rubio.
“Who did you understand ‘we’ to be referring to?” Steinglass pressed.
Since Michael Cohen wasn’t part of the campaign ,when he said ‘we,’ I thought he was talking about himself and Mr Trump.
Pecker recounted how Cohen repeatedly insisted he wasn’t part of the campaign, but “Michael was physically in every aspect of whatever the campaign was working on, at least at Trump organization, Trump Tower.”
