The first witness to be called in Donald Trump’s criminal hush money trial was his longtime associate and friend, David Pecker. Pecker was also at the head of the company that owned the National Enquirer and other gossip papers, a position with a significant amount of power to influence public opinion.
Pecker took the stand briefly on Monday, but it was on Tuesday that his testimony really began to help shape the story prosecutors are trying to communicate to the jury.
To prove that Trump’s falsification of business records reached the level of felony, they need to show that the acts he was covering up were criminal. As his attorneys and supporters have argued, it’s not necessarily a crime to hide an affair, but to do so as part of a political campaign, and to not report the costs and campaign costs, would be illegal.
Prosecutors need to convince the jury that Trump carried out these actions not to prevent personal embarrassment or his wife’s ire, but to hide important facts about himself, the candidate, from voters. To convict, the jury needs to believe that Trump was directly involved, that he was the one carrying out illegal activities, not that others were doing it on his behalf or behind his back, as Trump implied when he said to reporters, “Some accountant I didn’t know marked it down as legal expenses.”
Pecker supplied testimony to support these points as he testified. CNN reported:
“Trump, Cohen and Pecker had an in-person meeting in August 2015 where the agreement was generally made: Pecker would be ‘eyes and ears’ of Trump’s 2016 campaign and notify Cohen if women selling negative stories about Trump emerged, he has testified to the jury.”
He also testified that Trump was frugal with money, and described his very hands-on approach, in which he would be the one to sign or personally approve checks and payments as they went out.
In fact, he described the “source agreements” he used, in which he would pay for a story and warn that it could not be released by anyone but his magazine for a set period of time, then would simply sit on the story to silence it.
A key point for the prosecution is that Pecker testified, while he had worked with Trump before, until they coordinated for campaign purposes, he had never bought a story to silence it, according to MSNBC’s Katie Phang.
Pecker also testified that there were concerns about women coming forward to share their stories because Trump was known as an “eligible bachelor” who dated beautiful women — though in 2015, he’d been married to Melania Trump for a decade, and had been dating her since 1998, a year after his 1997 divorce from his previous wife, Marla Maples.
Other witnesses, including Trump’s former fixer, Michael Cohen, are expected to verify additional parts of this, including Trump’s personal involvement, and the campaign being the motivation, but Pecker’s testimony from the beginning sets up the story and timeline — and it doesn’t look good for the defense.
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