David Pecker, long-time publisher of the National Enquirer and Donald Trump’s bosom buddy, spent hours on the witness stand in Manhattan last week.
With the relaxed demeanor of a jovial grandfather, Pecker described how he, candidate Trump and Michael Cohen met in 2015 to plot how they’d influence the outcome of the 2016 election. During that meeting, they conspired to hide news that could harm Trump and embellish fake stories that disparaged Trump’s rivals.
All was done, Pecker testified, with the express and stated intention of promoting Trump’s candidacy for U.S. president.
Pecker’s testimony made clear that mainstream media’s insistence on calling the case a “hush money” trial is sloppy. The case is about Trump’s conspiracy to violate federal election laws. Paying hush money to a porn star is legal. Falsifying business records to hide illegal campaign contributions is not.
Trump, Pecker and Cohen paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to “kill” news that could hurt Trump’s campaign, without reporting those payments to the Federal Election Commission as the campaign contributions they were.
As part of the same conspiracy, Trump and Pecker also manufactured fake stories to damage Trump’s political rivals. Who can forget Trump’s claim that Sen. Ted Cruz’s father was involved with the assassination of JFK? During an interview, Trump told Fox News, “(Cruz’s) father was with Lee Harvey Oswald” just before Oswald was shot.
It was a complete fabrication hatched by Pecker and Trump, and it made headlines — as intended.
Federal rules on this question aren’t complicated: Under federal campaign finance law, “anything of value given, loaned or advanced to influence a federal election” is considered a campaign contribution.
Money. Office equipment. The purchased silence of an adult film actress.
All such political contributions to federal candidates’ campaign committees are subject to the Federal Election Campaign Act’s source prohibitions; they are also legally subject to the Act’s amount limitations. Expenditures to purchase media coverage are reported campaign expenses. Expenditures to suppress media coverage are the same.
In an effort to track illegal contributions, influence and foreign interference, every campaign contribution is tightly monitored, and subject to the Act’s recordkeeping and reporting requirements. Individual contributions to politicians’ campaign committees are limited to several thousand dollars per person. Nowhere under federal election law can an individual or a candidate advance hundreds of thousands of dollars to directly aid a candidate’s campaign without reporting it.
Killing the Stormy Daniels story fit Trump’s pattern
The crux of Trump’s current case — the first of four separate felony trials he’s slated to face — is Trump’s $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels to kill her story about their tryst in 2006, just after his wife gave birth to their son, Barron.
Trump similarly conspired to kill a story from Karen McDougal, a Playboy model Trump referred to as “our girl.” Pecker’s arrangement with McDougal went beyond a simple payment to bury her story about Trump. It also guaranteed McDougal the opportunity to publish her fitness columns with the National Enquirer’s parent company, and it included a guarantee of two magazine covers.
Pecker testified under oath that the agreement with McDougal was camouflage, intentionally disguised as a “contract for services” in an effort to circumvent federal campaign finance laws. Pecker said he feared at the time that what they were doing violated federal law. He said he told Cohen as much at the time, but Cohen was unfazed because, “Jeff Sessions is the attorney general and Donald Trump has him in his pocket.”
Fox News models Trump’s fake news in the National Enquirer
Anyone hoping Pecker’s explosive evidence will dampen the enthusiasm of Trump’s cult supporters will be sorely disappointed, because, thanks to Fox News, they will never know about it.
The big reveal here isn’t the criminality of a defeated ex-president. It isn’t that Trump had sex with a porn star. And it isn’t that Trump and Cohen, his “fixer” — what kind of presidential candidate has a “fixer,” anyway? — paid to kill stories in order to influence the election.
The big story is that, in a trial exposing how Trump used fake news to get elected in 2016, Fox News continues to peddle the same kind of genuinely fake news to its viewers that got it in such massive trouble after Trump’s defeat in 2020.
Despite paying nearly $800 million for admittedly lying to viewers about the 2020 election, Fox is up to the same tricks in 2024. Fox continues to falsely portray Trump’s trial, while embellishing stories like the “border invasion” to harm Trump’s political rivals.
During voir dire earlier this month, Jesse Watters, a Fox News commentator, announced on Fox: “They are catching undercover Liberal Activists lying to the Judge in order to get on the Trump Jury,” painting Trump as a victim of the “deep state.” There was, and remains, no evidence of liberal activists trying to get on the jury, and there is no evidence whatsoever that Biden has anything to do with the Manhattan district attorney’s charging decisions. Said district attorney is independently elected within New York City
Fox also claims that the court requiring Trump to attend his trial, as any criminal defendant is required to do, is “cruel and unusual punishment.” On the morning of the first day of Pecker’s testimony, instead of discussing what Pecker said, the network platformed Trump’s rants against the entire trial, as he fumed outside the courtroom, full throttle, for nearly three full minutes.
On the night of Pecker’s shocking testimony, which made headlines across nearly all mainstream outlets, Foxnews.com didn’t cover it in any meaningful way. The only trial-related news Fox ran called the trial an “historic mistake,” based on an editorial that was written prior to Pecker’s testimony.
With the headline, “Law professor roasts Manhattan DA’s case against Trump in NY Times guest essay,” Fox buried all pertinent facts about Pecker’s testimony, substituting real news with fake news and spin just as Pecker, Cohen and Trump did in 2016.
Fox News should be held accountable
As the 2016 election and January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol proved, fake news is powerful. The resulting damage to our country, the election process, public discourse and democratic norms is incalculable.
This week, former GOP Rep. Adam Kinzinger, who served on the U.S. House’s J6 select committee, described Fox News’ “line-up of flame-throwing commentators” who, every night, shout “alarms about the so-called communists and socialists — read: liberals — who supposedly threatened America’s very existence.”
Noting how Rush Limbaugh, then Tucker Carlson, and now Jesse Watters have all “served the same function — twisting facts and making their followers’ blood boil” in service to the party of Trump, Kinzinger concluded that, “these [GOP adjacent] media figures have done more to divide America than another single factor …”
It is also widely suspected that Russian propaganda has “infected a good chunk of” the GOP base, because Fox News constantly repeats Putin talking points in service to Trump.
Writing for the Washington Post, Robert Kagan wryly observed that, “A healthy republic would not be debating whether Trump and his followers seek the overthrow of the Founders’ system of liberal democracy. What more do people need to see (other than Trump’s) well-documented attempt to prevent the peaceful transfer of power…?”
Kagan is not wrong, but he assumes the MAGA base has seen evidence of Trump’s well-documented criminality. They have not. Fox News-watching MAGA voters haven’t seen, heard or read about Trump’s crimes, because Fox News consistently lies about them, just as it is continuing to lie about Trump’s separate election interference case.
Fox has convinced roughly 40 percent of Americans that a dangerous demagogue is qualified to have the nuclear codes once again. Just as Hitler’s supporters eventually learned that his power was based on manufactured propaganda, Trump’s supporters will, gradually and eventually, learn the same. As long as their belief system remains unchallenged by their main source of information, Fox News, they can delay their own moment of reckoning.
Perhaps their reckoning will begin when Fox next appears in court to face the staggering damages they have caused through their destructive brand of fake news.
A massive, adverse court ruling kind of accountability that hurts — and one that can’t be hushed up — would be an excellent start.
