Wow, this is just going to blow your mind—the National Enquirer kept a safe filled with documentation related to the seedy sex stories the tabloid paper had acquired and quashed on behalf of Donald Trump during the 2016 election.
According to the AP, "the safe was a great source of power" for David Pecker, the CEO of the Enquirer's parent company, American Media Inc., who has reportedly been granted immunity to share information about the hush-money deals with federal prosecutors. A great source of "power," as in the kind Vladimir Putin leverages over people through kompromat—blackmail through and through.
It was all very cozy and peachy until... wait for it ... they got found out by a newspaper with actual journalists.
But after The Wall Street Journal initially published the first details of Playboy model Karen McDougal’s catch-and-kill deal shortly before the 2016 election, those assets became a liability. Fearful that the documents might be used against American Media, Pecker and the company’s chief content officer, Dylan Howard, removed them from the safe in the weeks before Trump’s inauguration, according to one person directly familiar with the events. (emphasis added)
In other words, yeah, we knew this conspiracy with Trump was totally illegal and could blow up in our faces, so we took action to cover our butts.
The AP could not confirm whether the documents had been destroyed or simply moved to a more remote location with fewer eyeballs, hands, and "rats!" (cc: FBI) All of this of course relates back to Michael Cohen's charging documents, which detailed the "catch-and-kill" scheme Cohen and Pecker executed on behalf of Trump.
If you recall, all those deals were wrapped up in a nice little bow with payments to American Media to ensure the stories would be kept quiet. From the Cohen/Trump released several weeks ago:
Such a purchase was necessary, they suggested, to prevent Trump from having to permanently rely on a tight relationship with the tabloid.
“You never know where that company — you never know what he’s gonna be —” Cohen says.
“David gets hit by a truck,” Trump says.
“Correct,” Cohen replies. “So, I’m all over that.”
That worked out well.