A former doorman at one of Donald Trump’s New York City buildings sold a story about Trump having an illegitimate child to the National Enquirer … and it’s not the illegitimate child part of the story that’s the most interesting. The interesting thing is why you haven’t heard the doorman’s story from the National Enquirer.
Just as the Enquirer bought former Playmate Karen McDougal’s story of an affair with Trump in order to keep it out of the news, staffers say the pro-Trump publication bought doorman Dino Sajudin’s story for $30,000 and then immediately killed it. The tabloid’s official story is that the tip just didn’t pan out:
But four longtime Enquirer staffers directly familiar with the episode challenged Howard's version of events. They said they were ordered by top editors to stop pursuing the story before completing potentially promising reporting threads.
They said the publication didn't pursue standard Enquirer reporting practices, such as exhaustive stake-outs or tabloid tactics designed to prove paternity. In 2008, the Enquirer helped bring down presidential hopeful John Edwards in part by digging through a dumpster and retrieving material to do a DNA test that indicated he had fathered a child with a mistress, according to a former staffer. [...]
The Enquirer staffers, all with years of experience negotiating source contracts, said the abrupt end to reporting combined with a binding, seven-figure penalty to stop the tipster from talking to anyone led them to conclude that this was a so-called "catch and kill" — a tabloid practice in which a publication pays for a story to never run, either as a favor to the celebrity subject of the tip or as leverage over that person.
The FBI search of longtime Trump lawyer Michael Cohen’s office and home on Monday was reportedly seeking information about the payment to McDougal—which means the Enquirer’s practice of paying people for stories about Trump only to keep them quiet is part of that investigation. And Cohen acknowledges having talked to the Enquirer about Sajudin’s story. The AP reports that “He said he was acting as a Trump spokesman when he did so and denied knowing anything beforehand about the Enquirer payment to the ex-doorman.” But that starts out not very believable and gets even less believable when you remember that in one case, Cohen went from screaming to calm and relaxed as soon as someone with compromising photos of Trump said he was taking them to the Enquirer.
It sure makes you wonder how many other stories about Trump the Enquirer is sitting on. And what Michael Cohen knew about each of them.