In the months leading up to the 2016 election, two different women’s stories of past affairs with Donald Trump were hushed up through six-figure payments: adult film actress Stormy Daniels (real name Stephanie Clifford) was paid $130,000 by Trump’s longtime lawyer Michael Cohen and former Playboy Playmate Karen McDougal was paid $150,000 by American Media Inc., publisher of the National Enquirer, with the intention of not running her story. Here’s the thing: those two payouts to different women may have technically come from different sources, but it was all part of the same system of fixing Trump’s problems. How connected were Cohen and AMI when it comes to hushing up Trump stories? Check this out:
It was July 2015 when Mr. Cohen received a phone call from Jeremy Frommer, a hedge-fund manager turned digital entrepreneur, who had obtained photos of Mr. Trump appearing to autograph the breasts of a topless woman from the estate of Bob Guccione, the founder of Penthouse magazine. Mr. Cohen was not pleased.
“He was in a rage,” Mr. Frommer said in an interview. “He’s like, ‘If you show those photos, I’m gonna take you down.’” [...]
In talking with Mr. Cohen, Mr. Frommer mentioned Mr. Pecker. Years earlier, Mr. Frommer had sold American Media the exclusive rights to a suggestive photograph of Arnold Schwarzenegger — which it did not publish — and he knew the company’s chief executive.
Mr. Frommer recalled Mr. Cohen’s saying, “Yeah, I know Pecker.” Mr. Frommer added, “That’s where the conversation calmed down.”
Seriously: here’s the lawyer for a presidential candidate. He’s talking to someone about embarrassing pictures of his client … and the moment he calms down is when he hears that the pictures might be sold to one of the nation’s major tabloids. It couldn’t be much clearer that there’s an established practice of AMI protecting Trump from himself. The real question is who else they and Cohen have paid off and hushed up and what other stories are out there.