April 30, 2024 11:59 AM UTC

Trump Hush Money Trial: That's One Contemptible Pecker

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• by: Colorado Pols

Court is back in session today in the first criminal trial of former President Donald Trump, over charges he manipulated business records to conceal a “hush money” payment to porn star Stormy Daniels for the purpose of keeping her quiet about an affair with Trump through the 2016 elections. The first order of business today was a long-awaited contempt of court ruling against Trump, imposing fines but no jail time–yet–for Trump’s social media attacks on court employees:

The judge overseeing Donald Trump’s falsifying business records criminal trial held the former president in contempt of court Tuesday for nine violations of a gag order that was imposed to protect the safety of people involved in the trial and their families.

New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan said Trump purposely violated the order in his Truth Social posts and campaign materials and that his behavior warranted a finding of contempt and a $9,000 fine…

Merchan also warned Trump that if he kept violating the order, the judge would consider putting Trump in jail for the violations. Trump has until 2:15 p.m. on Tuesday to remove “the seven offending posts from Defendant’s Truth Social account and the two offending posts from his campaign website.”

Faced with the unprecedented possibility of throwing a former President with Secret Service protection in jail, the court has been exceedingly patient with Trump while he continually tests the boundaries, seemingly daring Judge Juan Merchan to impose such a penalty with all of the complications it would entail–all of which Trump would raise maximum hell over knowing full well he had goaded the judge into taking action.

Last Friday, National Enquirer publisher David Pecker wrapped up his explosive testimony regarding his “catch and kill” agreement with the Trump campaign to buy the rights of negative stories and then deliberately never publish them. Three main examples cited by Pecker were the Stormy Daniels case, Playboy model Karen McDougall’s claimed affair with Trump, and another story about a possible child out of wedlock that even the Enquirer didn’t think had any credibility. ABC News:

In their cross-examination of former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker on Friday, defense attorneys in Trump’s hush money case sought to reframe the tabloid’s motivation for coordinating with Trump and his then-attorney, Michael Cohen, ahead of the 2016 election, suggesting that Pecker was just trying to boost magazine sales…

But that didn’t work out very well.

Though [defense attorney Emil] Bove’s line of questioning attempted to distance Trump from the catch-and-kill plan, Pecker previously acknowledged that buying up scoops and killing them did nothing for the tabloid’s bottom line.

“How was that going to boost sales of the National Enquirer?” Steinglass asked Tuesday.

“No, that part didn’t help,” Pecker said.

Obviously, buying up the rights to potentially huge stories and then sitting on those stories instead of publishing them was not a decision made with the growth of the Enquirer’s circulation in mind. Combined with the promotion of large volumes of false material about Trump’s political opponents from Ted Cruz to Hillary Clinton, the “catch and kill” scheme operated by Pecker turned the Enquirer into a powerful secret weapon for Trump in the 2016 elections. That political advantage was an end unto itself.

For any other politician, the disclosure of this kind of collusion with a media outlet to snuff out scandals on his behalf would be career-ending on its own. For Donald Trump, the defense is essentially that all of this nefarious conduct was legal and therefore not worth discussing. Trump’s blanket denials that any of these affairs occurred are absurd in the context of these elaborate machinations to conceal the stories from publication. And again, it’s the concealment of the payoffs to hide them from the public that constitutes the crime Trump is accused of.

Everything we’re learning along the way is to establish how that specific crime was carried out. And to the extent that Trump can be damaged by anything, it’s an exceedingly damaging narrative.

And that is why even this “least important” of Trump’s criminal trials is still, well, very important.