National Enquirer publisher testifies he used tabloid to suppress unfavourable Trump stories
The first witness in Donald Trump’s criminal hush money trial, former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker, testified on Tuesday that he used his supermarket tabloid to suppress stories that might have hurt Trump’s 2016 presidential bid.
Pecker, 72, testified in a New York court that the Enquirer paid two people who were peddling stories of Trump’s sexual misbehaviour but never published them — a practice known as “catch and kill.”
“When someone’s running for public office like this, it is very common for these women to call up a magazine like the National Enquirer to try to sell their stories,” Pecker testified.
Pecker said the decision to bury the stories followed a 2015 meeting at which he told Trump that the Enquirer would publish favourable stories about the billionaire candidate and keep an eye out for people selling stories that might hurt him. He said he told an editor to keep the arrangement secret.
Pecker said the Enquirer paid former Playboy model Karen McDougal for her story of a sexual relationship with Trump in 2006 and 2007. He said he bought the story after Trump refused to do so himself.
“He said that anytime you do anything like this it always gets out,” Pecker said.
Former U.S. president Donald Trump’s hush-money trial began in earnest on Monday with opening statements and the first witness. Trump is accused of allegedly falsifying business records to cover up paying porn star Stormy Daniels to bury her story about their sexual encounter, which he denies.
The Enquirer’s parent company, American Media, said in 2018 it paid $150,000 for the story. Trump has denied having an affair with McDougal.
The tabloid also paid $30,000 for a story peddled by former Trump Tower doorman Dino Sajudin, who claimed Trump fathered a child with a maid who worked for him. The story turned out not to be true, Pecker said.
Both payments far exceeded the amounts the paper typically paid for stories, he said. “I made the decision to buy the story because of the potential embarrassment it would have to the campaign and Mr. Trump,” Pecker said.
He is expected to testify further when the trial resumes on Thursday.
Pecker’s actions helped deceive voters: prosecution
Prosecutors say Pecker’s actions helped Trump deceive voters in the 2016 election by burying stories of alleged extramarital affairs at a time when he already faced multiple accusations of sexual misbehaviour.
They have charged Trump with criminally falsifying business records to cover up a $130,000 payment to buy the silence of porn star Stormy Daniels, who says they had a sexual encounter 10 years earlier.
Trump has pleaded not guilty and denies having an encounter with Daniels. His lawyers argue that Trump did not commit any crimes and only acted to protect his reputation.
The case may be the only one of Trump’s four criminal prosecutions to go to trial before the Republican’s Nov. 5 election rematch with Democratic President Joe Biden.
A guilty verdict would not bar Trump from taking office but could hurt his candidacy.
‘Losing all credibility’
Pecker’s testimony came after a hearing to consider prosecutors’ request to fine Trump $10,000 for violating a gag order prohibiting him from criticizing witnesses, court officials and their relatives.
Justice Juan Merchan said he would not immediately rule on that request, but he appeared unmoved by Trump defence lawyer Todd Blanche’s arguments that Trump was responding to political attacks, not intimidating witnesses.
“You’ve presented nothing,” Merchan said. “I’ve asked you eight or nine times, show me the exact post he was responding to. You’ve not even been able to do that once.”
Former federal prosecutor Joseph Moreno explains why hush money payments weren’t illegal, but the way they were concealed may have been.
“I have to tell you right now, you’re losing all credibility with the court,” the judge added.
After the session, Trump repeated his claim that the gag order violated his constitutional free speech rights.
“This is a kangaroo court and the judge should recuse himself!” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform.
New York prosecutor Christopher Conroy said Trump has run afoul of the order, pointing to an April 10 Truth Social post that called Daniels and Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen “sleazebags.” Both are expected to testify in the first criminal trial of a former U.S. president.
‘He does it anyway’
Conroy said other posts led to media coverage that prompted a juror last week to withdraw over privacy concerns.
“He knows what he’s not allowed to do and he does it anyway,” Conroy said of Trump. “His disobedience of the order is willful. It’s intentional.”
The $10,000 fine sought by Conroy would be a relatively small penalty for Trump, who has posted $266.6 million in bonds as he appeals civil judgments in two other cases.
Conroy said he was not at this point asking Merchan to send Trump to jail for up to 30 days, as New York law allows.
“The defendant seems to be angling for that,” Conroy said.
Blanche said Trump’s posts were responses to political attacks by Cohen and not related to his former lawyer’s expected testimony.
“He’s allowed to respond to political attacks,” Blanche said.
Published at Tue, 23 Apr 2024 19:08:41 +0000
Why rights groups say so many Palestinians in the West Bank are being attacked with impunity
For years, even decades, human rights groups that monitor the occupied West Bank have implored Israel’s allies to take steps to punish Jewish settlers and members of Israel’s military who attack Palestinians and seem to carry out their actions with impunity.
And so when word came over the weekend that Israel’s closest ally, the United States, reportedly plans to hold members of an Israeli military battalion composed of ultra-orthodox and religious nationalist members accountable, they saw it as progress.
Earlier, the United States and Europe had placed economic and travel sanctions on a few key settlers believed to be responsible for instigating attacks, but implementing penalties and putting restrictions on a branch of the Israel Defence Forces is unprecedented.
Israel’s government was indignant and rejected the suggestion that the military unit should be singled out.
Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said imposing sanctions on the Netzah Yehuda battalion while the war against Hamas still rages and the unit is fighting in Gaza “casts a heavy shadow” on other IDF units.
And Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu suggested the potential U.S. measure was “the peak of absurdity and a moral low,” as he vowed to fight it.
A series of U.S. statutes, known as the Leahy Laws, prohibit U.S. military assistance from being transferred to organizations that the U.S. State Department determines have committed human rights abuses.
And by many accounts, the abuses attributed to Netzah Yehuda during its decades-long time as enforcers of Israel’s rules in the West Bank are about as bad as they get.
In one incident in 2022, members of the unit dragged a 78-year-old American Palestinian man, Omar Assad, from his car after being stopped at a checkpoint. He was bound, gagged, blindfolded and beaten. An autopsy concluded he died of a heart attack from the stress of the encounter.
Violent rampages against property, Palestinians say
While the U.S. move is linked to events that happened before Oct. 7, the potential sanctions come at a time when violence against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank has reached new levels in the aftermath of Hamas’s attacks on southern Israel.
There have been violent rampages against Palestinian homes, businesses and property almost every day of late, in many cases with Israeli soldiers present, but not intervening to stop the rampages, say Palestinians who witnessed them.
Palestinian officials say more than 486 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank since Oct. 7, many in military raids and others from attacks by settlers.
Palestinians in the occupied West Bank say nowhere is safe after a wave of Israeli settler violence that’s been increasing since the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas on Israel.
The United Nations has recorded 774 attacks by settlers on Palestinians in the past six months, with Israeli soldiers present in nearly half the attacks. Human Rights Watch says the violence has forced Palestinians to flee at least seven communities permanently.
In its most recent report encapsulating the whole of the year — both before and after Oct. 7 — the UN said 2023 was the worst year for settler attacks on Palestinians in any year since tracking started in 2006.
“If you want to solve the problem, you have to go after the government that’s responsible for allowing this to happen,” said Omar Shakir, the Israel and Palestine director for Human Rights Watch.
“The reason why we’re seeing this unprecedented increase in settler violence is because of decades of impunity for settler violence,” he told CBC News in an interview in Ramallah.
“They [settlers] are armed by the Israeli government. They are sometimes directly encouraged to carry out attacks, and they’re doing so in more and more areas that the Israeli government covets for settlements.”
In a WhatsApp message to CBC News, the IDF said its role is to “protect the property and lives of all citizens,” and that security forces have “means to disperse demonstrations.”
A team from CBC News recently spent time in the village of Al Mughayyir, about 27 kilometres northeast of Ramallah, which was the site of a deadly rampage by hundreds of settlers on April 12.
Over the following two days and nights, other Palestinian villages nearby were also burned, causing damage to 60 properties and more than 100 vehicles, according to Israeli human rights group Yesh Din.
We visited the scene of a deadly shooting at the home of Abdullatif Abu Alia.
A blood-soaked pillow and blanket on the flat roof of his home marked the spot where he said his cousin, Jehad Abu Alia, bled to death.
“Hundreds of settlers besieged the house,” he told CBC News.
Jehad Abu Alia, 25, was visiting his extended family when the home was suddenly surrounded by masked settlers, many carrying guns, and others throwing rocks.
Abu Alia said his family barricaded themselves inside as windows were smashed and vehicles outside set on fire.
Abu Alia said at one point, someone on the ground fired shots at their position on the top of the building and Jehad was hit in the head.
“The army was helping [the settlers] and they stopped all kinds of ambulances and medical people from coming to help the injured,” Abu Alia said.
With no way to get his cousin to hospital, Abu Alia said all he could do was to try to stop the blood gushing from the wound himself, in what turned out to be a futile effort to save his life.
The trigger for the Al Mughayyir rampage was the disappearance that morning of a 14-year-old Israeli teenager and sheep herder, Benjamin Achimeir.
Not long after the mob attack began, a police drone spotted his body not far from the outskirts of Al Mughayyir.
Although the circumstances of his death remain unexplained by Israeli authorities, Netanyahu called it a “heinous murder.”
On Monday morning, the IDF, Israel’s internal security agency Shin Bet and Israeli police announced they had arrested a 21-year-old Palestinian. The statement said he had “implicated himself” in the teen’s death after an interrogation by Shin Bet.
Since the violence in Al Mughayyir, there have been several attacks by settlers in the West Bank, including one this past weekend that killed a Palestinian ambulance driver who came to help the injured in the town of As-Sawiya, according to the Palestinian Health Authority.
“Since Oct. 7, we have seen an unprecedented integration of violent settlers into the security forces,” said Shakir, of Human Rights Watch.
“So whereas before there was a clear differentiation between security forces and settlers, you have increasing situations where settlers are wearing army uniforms.”
Settler population increased
Under successive Israeli governments, the settler population has surged, growing 15 per cent in the last five years, according to one study by the pro-settler group WestBankJewishPopulationStats.com.
There are now more 517,000 settlers living in the occupied West Bank, with 200,000 Jewish settlers living in occupied areas of East Jerusalem.
The United Nations considers the Jewish settlements to be illegal, as do Canada and many other Western countries.
Shakir said of late, revenge has been another motive for the violence, with many settlers seeking retribution on Palestinians in the West Bank for Hamas’s massacre of Israelis on Oct. 7.
The Hamas militants who streamed across the Gaza border and into Israel on Oct. 7 killed more than 1,200 people and kidnapped 253 people, according to Israeli government tallies.
Palestinian officials say more than 34,000 people have been killed in Gaza since the war began, with Israel’s military flattening vast parts of the territory in an effort to destroy Hamas.
A 17-year-old Palestinian American shot dead by Israeli men in the West Bank is one of the latest victims of increased violence in the area, something his family blames largely on the U.S. government’s support of Israel.
During the CBC News visit to Al Mughayyir, our team also met with Palestinian shepherd Imad Abu Alia.
He said in the months leading up to the attack on the village, settlers from several nearby communities had been using drones to watch his property and track his herd of sheep while they grazed.
During the mayhem in Al Mughayyir, he said a group came onto his farm and burned his barn, killing some of his sheep and stealing the rest of the 120 animals in his herd.
When he tried to save his flock, he said the mob attacked him, leaving him with a neck brace and immobilized in bed.
“They beat me so much to the point that I saw death with my own eyes,” he told CBC News.
Without his sheep to support his family, Abu Alia said he does not know what he will do.
“These sheep are like my children,” he said. “I just want them back.”
Rights groups say seizing the livestock of Palestinians and constructing grazing outposts has become a new tactic of the settlers, as it deprives Palestinians of an income and often forces them to abandon their properties.
CBC News asked Israel’s military for more details on the death of Benjamin Achimeir.
In a WhatsApp message, the IDF said that there were “signs of violence” but did not provide further details.
With regards to Palestinian allegations about the conduct of Israeli soldiers in Al Mughayyir, the IDF said complaints “about soldiers’ behaviour that is not in accordance with orders will be examined.”
Regarding the allegations that security forces held up ambulances and prevented the wounded from reaching hospital, the IDF said that was necessary for a “security check” before the ambulances were given the authorization to continue.
Israeli human rights group Yesh Din says between 2005 and 2022, 93 per cent of investigations against settlers who attacked Palestinians were closed without any charges.
Published at Tue, 23 Apr 2024 08:00:00 +0000
