Former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker is expected to detail schemes to buy up and bury stories from a Playboy Playmate and porn star who said they had trysts with Donald Trump — in his third day on the stand at the ex-president’s “hush money” trial.
Pecker, 72, was in the middle of describing a conversation he says he had with Trump about whether to pay off former Playmate Karen McDougal, who says she had a year-long affair with Trump, to keep her story from being published — when court ended for the day on Tuesday.
The court was then in recess on Wednesday for the judge to oversee his other cases.
Pecker has testified that he mostly dealt with Trump’s then-fixer Michael Cohen, but that Trump himself called him about McDougal while Pecker was meeting with an Enquirer investor in New Jersey.
Pecker wanted to buy the story on Trump’s behalf to bar McDougal from going public, but Trump initially feared that the truth would later emerge, Pecker said.
“He said, ‘I don’t buy any stories. Any time you do anything like this, it always gets out,’” Pecker testified.
Pecker, Cohen and Trump later worked together to pay McDougal $150,000 to silence her — in a payment that is now a key component of Trump’s criminal trial, prosecutors say.
Pecker is also expected to lay out his role in porn star Stormy Daniels’ $130,000 payout.
Prosecutors say he tipped Cohen off that Daniels was trying to sell her story, but didn’t want to front the money himself because he had yet to be reimbursed from the McDougal payoff.
After prosecutors finish questioning him, Trump’s lawyers will get the chance to grill Pecker under cross-examination.
Trump, 77, has pleaded not guilty to 34 counts of fudging business records by falsely calling reimbursements for Cohen’s payment to Daniels “legal expenses” on company documents.
The falsifying business records charge is a felony if business records are fudged to cover up another “crime” — and prosecutors say the hush money payoffs were part of a “criminal scheme to corrupt the 2016 presidential election.”
