Former President Donald Trump speaks to the media while departing Manhattan Criminal Court on Tuesday (Picture: Getty Images)
Ex-President Donald Trump was the ‘most eligible bachelor’ who ‘dated the most beautiful women’, testified the first witness in his hush money trial.
Former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker detailed his relationship with Trump when it came to ‘catch-and-kill’, or purchasing and killing potentially negative stories.
Pecker, 72, the government’s first witness, on the stand on Tuesday said he would alert Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, about stories involving Trump and women.
Trump was ‘well known as the most eligible bachelor’ who ‘dated the most beautiful women’, Pecker said.
Courtroom sketch shows David Pecker being questioned during former President Donald Trump’s criminal trial (Picture: Reuters)
‘I was the person that thought there would be a lot of women to come out try to sell their stories,’ he continued.
‘It is my experience that when someone runs for office like this, it’s very common for these women to call the National Enquirer and try to sell their stories.’
Trump faces 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in the first criminal trial of any former or serving US president. His case centers around a $130,000 payment Cohen made to porn start Stormy Daniels to silence her on an alleged affair. Prosecutors argue that Trump reimbursed Cohen and falsified records to conceal the transaction.
Pecker said he had a meeting with Cohen in 2015 regarding what he could do to ‘help the campaign’. They reached a ‘mutually beneficial’ agreement ‘amongst friends’ which boosted Trump’s image on the 2016 campaign trail, as well as magazine sales.
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