The book also focuses at length on Trump’s relationship with the fact-challenged tabloid company American Media Inc. and its recently departed longtime chairman David Pecker.
Though Cohen laments many choices he made during his time working for Trump, the AMI ordeal seems to weigh most heavily on the former fixer. The symbiotic partnership between Trump and Pecker, an acolyte of the celebrity real-estate mogul, eventually landed Cohen in jail after Cohen, shortly before the Nov. 8, 2016 election, concealed illegal payments to porn star Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal in exchange for their silence about affairs with Trump.
Cohen writes about multiple now-infamous instances in which he teamed up with Pecker and his deputy, Australian citizen Dylan Howard, to “catch-and-kill” damaging stories about Trump as a favor and occasional business transaction. Cohen describes how Pecker would flatter Trump, inflating his ego by talking about the mogul’s large net worth and running fawning profiles about the reality star in the National Enquirer.
“It’s not about the truth,” Pecker allegedly told Cohen when the two attempted to bury one allegation of Trump sexually harassing a woman in Atlantic City. “I have been watching his back for years. When I spoke to Mr. Trump about this, he told me to call you—that you and I will work together and handle these problems together.”
Cohen describes Pecker as a “sycophant and supplicant and propagandist,” whose willingness to spread disinformation to help his preferred candidate was “insidious and dangerous.”
Though Pecker avoided any legal consequences himself by agreeing to cooperate with federal prosecutors to share knowledge about Cohen and Trump’s knowledge of the illegal campaign payments, the former Trump lawyer seems to take some solace in the fact that Trump also stiffed Pecker out of a promised $150,000 to reimburse AMI for its payment to silence McDougal.
The book also details AMI’s other attempts to tip the scales in favor of Trump by spreading unverifiable information on the president’s 2016 Republican presidential primary opponents.
Cohen recalls how Pecker called him gleefully during the primary about a questionable photo the National Enquirer planned on running, allegedly showing Sen. Ted Cruz’s father Rafael and JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald passing out leaflets on a New Orleans street corner.
According to the book, Pecker showed Cohen a mock-up of the publication’s spread on the photo before it was published. When Cohen asked about the photo’s veracity, Pecker did not seem concerned.
“Does it matter?” Pecker said, according to the book. “All we have to do is allege that it is.”
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