Ex-National Enquirer Chief Details 'Catch And Kill' Schemes At Trump Trial

David Pecker, former publisher of the National Enquirer, testified at Donald Trump’s hush money trial Tuesday about the “catch and kill” agreements between the former president and the tabloid, detailing arrangements involving Trump’s former doorman and an ex-Playboy model.

Pecker’s testimony comes a day after prosecutors alleged that Trump greenlighted the catch-and-kill schemes in which the National Enquirer would buy exclusive rights to someone’s purported damaging information about Trump in order to stop it from being released by anyone else and then not publishing the story itself. The tabloid’s former chief said he and Trump’s legal team agreed to the schemes in an August 2015 meeting, which prosecutors claim constitutes criminal conspiracy.

The first of those incidents involved Trump’s former doorman, Dino Sajudin, who was peddling a story about Trump allegedly fathering a child with a Trump Tower maid in the 1980s, Pecker told jurors. Pecker said he reached out to Trump’s then-lawyer Michael Cohen, who told him the story was “absolutely not true” but asked him to look into it regardless.

Pecker eventually agreed to buy rights to the story from the doorman for $30,000. He said Cohen then told him, “The boss will be very pleased,” referring to Trump, who had announced his presidential campaign in June 2015. Prosecutors then showed jurors a copy of the November 2015 agreement.

If the story were true, Pecker testified, “it would be probably the biggest sale of the National Enquirer since the death of Elvis Presley.” However, Pecker said that, per a conversation he had with Cohen, the National Enquirer would have waited until after the 2016 election to publish anything if the story could be verified, but he told