David Pecker returns to witness stand as Trump's hush money trial resumes

NEW YORK — Former National Enquirer David Pecker returned to the stand Thursday at Donald Trump’s Manhattan Supreme Court hush money trial — where the jurors heard details on a scheme to disguise a $150,000 payment to Playboy model Karen McDougal before the 2016 election to keep quiet about an alleged affair with Trump.

Meanwhile, lawyers for the former president argued before the U.S. Supreme Court in an attempt to get him out of his election subversion case by invoking presidential immunity, Trump is expected to hear Pecker detail American Media’s effort to silence Playboy model Karen McDougal before the 2016 election about her allegations of an affair.

Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan previously denied Trump’s request to skip the morning’s proceedings so he could attend the arguments before the nation’s high court.

Merchan is due to issue a decision on prosecutors’ request to hold Trump in criminal contempt and impose monetary sanctions for potentially violating a gag order prohibiting him from publicly criticizing trial participants.

Pecker says he wanted to call off the Karen McDougal deal

Under questioning by prosecutor Joshua Steinglass, Pecker established the lengths they went to to disguise the $150,000 payment to Karen McDougal, including Michael Cohen creating a shell company and the labeling of the payment as a “flat fee for advisory services.”

Pecker had hesitations with the whole deal — testifying that he asked repeatedly where the money was going to come from — as he tried to appease his old friend Trump and his team.

He previously said Trump wanted boxes of “all the content” that the National Enquirer had on him. “The boss said, ‘If I got hit by a bus or the company was sold,’ he did not want someone else to potentially publish those stories,” Cohen said of Trump.

Pecker also testified about the explosive October 2016 phone conversation he had with Cohen where he told the fixer to “rip up” the deal.

“I called Michael Cohen and I told him that the agreement, the deal he signed, was off. ‘I am not going forward. It’s a bad idea and I want you to revoke the agreement.’

...continued

swipe to next page