Why was the Trump Secret Child story worth paying off?
It is easy to prove your innocence with a simple DNA test.
How Cohen says he helped pay off a Trump doorman.
Donald Trump told Michael Cohen to “just be prepared” because “there’s going to be a lot of women coming forward” once the 2016 presidential campaign launched, Cohen testified.
In the fall of 2016, a leader at the National Enquirer reached out to Michael Cohen to inform him that a former Trump Tower doorman was trying to sell a story that Trump had a secret child with a former employee.
Cohen testified that he immediately went to Trump with this information to get his direction on what to do next.
“He told me to make sure that the story does not get out,” Cohen testified. “‘You handle it,’” he said Trump told him.
The National Enquirer ultimately negotiated a deal to buy the rights to the doorman’s story to try to keep it from becoming public. Cohen said he was involved in the deal and pushed the National Enquirer to put a clause in the agreement that said the doorman would be fined $1 million if he ever violated the terms of the agreement.
Cohen said he informed Trump that he had worked to get that clause in there so that he could get credit with his boss.
The charges against Trump do not include anything about this payment to the doorman, but prosecutors probably wanted to elicit this back-and-forth with Cohen to show that Trump was reportedly aware and encouraging of the deals being made on his behalf. Trump and his lawyers have said that Cohen — not Trump — are responsible for the Stormy Daniels payment. To prove their case, prosecutors need to show that Trump was directly involved in the payment to Daniels.
Michael Cohen confirmed that the former owner of American Media Inc. agreed to suppress negative stories about Donald Trump as he became a candidate for president in the 2016 race, while also publishing potentially damaging stories about his competition.
That agreement was made at a meeting on the 26th floor of Trump Tower in 2015 and has become a key element in the prosecution’s narrative about Trump’s motive for hiding Stormy Daniels’s allegations about a sexual encounter from the voting public.
“What was discussed is the power of the National Enquirer in terms of being located at the cash register of so many supermarkets and bodegas,” Cohen testified. “That if we can place positive stories about Mr. Trump, that would be beneficial.”
Cohen added that the executive, David Pecker, discussed “if we could also place negative stories about some of the other candidates.”
“What [Pecker] also said was that he could keep an eye out for anything negative about Mr. Trump and that he would be able to help us to know in advance what was coming out and trying to stop it from coming out,” Cohen testified.
Pecker was the first witness at the trial and discussed having a long-standing relationship with Trump and how he would attempt to kill any affair stories that would potentially be for sale by buying them and keeping the rights without publishing them.