The Federal Election Commission has fined the National Enquirer’s parent company $187,500 for “knowingly and willfully” violating election law by making a payment in 2016 to Karen McDougal, a former Playboy model who said she had an affair with former president Donald Trump years before he was elected.
The decision came in response to a complaint made more than three years ago by the nonprofit government watchdog group Common Cause, which was notified of the FEC’s findings Tuesday.
The group had alleged that the company’s $150,000 payment to McDougal months before the 2016 election was effectively an illegal in-kind corporate contribution to Trump’s presidential campaign. The payment allegedly benefited Trump’s campaign by suppressing McDougal’s story of an alleged relationship with Trump before voters went to the polls. Continue reading.
Karen McDougal — a former Playboy model who Donald Trump paid to keep quiet ahead of the 2016 election — filed a lawsuit on Thursday against Fox News, accusing one of its hosts of defamation, the New York Timesreported.
McDougal claims the host, Tucker Carlson, defamed her when he said she “approached Donald Trump and threatened to ruin his career and humiliate his family if he doesn’t give them money.”
Carlson accused McDougal of “extortion” and said she demanded “ransom” from Trump. “No matter which version of Trump’s statements one believes, Trump never once claimed that he was extorted” McDougal’s lawsuit reads, according to the Times‘ report.
House Democrats plan to make President Trump’s alleged involvement in a 2016 scheme to silencetwo women who claimed they hadaffairs with him a major investigativefocus this fall, picking up where federal prosecutors left off in a case legal experts say could have led to additional indictments.
The House Judiciary Committee is preparing to hold hearings and call witnesses involved in hush-money payments to ex-
Playboy model Karen McDougal and adult-film star Stormy Daniels as soon as October, according to people familiar with the plans who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions.
Democrats say they believe there is already enough evidence to name Trump as a co-conspirator in the episode that resulted in his former attorney, Michael Cohen, pleading guilty to two campaign finance charges.
Prosecutors won’t likely charge a sitting president, yet have implicated him in a criminal scheme to pay off Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal. What to do then? Go to Congress.
Friday’s in-depth Wall Street Journal report suggests the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Southern District of New York and the FBI appear to possess evidence of Donald Trump’s involvement in a criminal scheme that helped get him elected president. This raises serious questions about what comes next, particularly in light of Trump’s appointment of Matthew Whitaker, a political loyalist, as acting attorney general.
Trump played a central role in hush-money payments made to Karen McDougal and Stephanie Clifford during the 2016 presidential campaign, the Journal reports, adding more detail to the case of Michael Cohen, Trump’s former fixer-lawyerwho pled guilty to federal campaign finance violations in the Southern District in August.
Recall that when Cohen pleaded guilty in federal court, he stated under oath that he had made the payments “in coordination and at the direction of a candidate for federal office”—many assumed that that candidate was Trump, of course. We now know from the Journal that the person who directed Cohen in this criminal scheme was, indeed, Donald Trump. The charging document to which Cohen pled guilty states that he “coordinated with one or more members of the campaign, including through meetings and phone calls, about the fact, nature, and timing of the payments.” The Journal reports that “[t]he unnamed campaign member or members referred to Mr. Trump, according to people familiar with the document.”
The following article by Melanie Schmitz was posted on the ThinkProgress.org website August 30, 2018:
The president was reportedly weighing the idea of buying American Media Inc.’s entire library of negative stories on him.
President Trump Credit: Mark Wilson/Getty Images
President Trump and his personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, discussed a plan to prevent the National Enquirer’s parent company from publishing a trove of negative news items about Trump spanning decades, according to a new report from the New York Times.
Just ahead of the 2016 presidential election, Trump and Cohen discussed buying the rights to the story of a woman who claimed to have had an affair with him years earlier, to the tune of $150,000. The woman, former Playboy model Karen McDougal, had previously been paid that amount by American Media Inc., the parent company of the National Enquirer, in a practice known as “catch-and-kill” — essentially, AMI purchased and buried her story, effectively silencing her.
The conversation in which Trump discussed purchasing McDougal’s story from AMI was since leaked to CNN in the form of an audio tape recorded by Cohen himself. However, a new report by The New York Times claims Trump had plans to buy not just McDougal’s story, but also the Enquirer’s entire archive of negative stories about him.
The following article by Eric Lutz was posted on the Mic.com website July 25, 2018:
President Donald Trump on Wednesday morning went into defense mode, bashing his former lawyer Michael Cohen for recording what appears to be him discussing hush money payments to a Playboy model, and implying that “positive things” he said were edited out of the tape released by CNN the night before.
Donald J. Trump
✔@realDonaldTrump
What kind of a lawyer would tape a client? So sad! Is this a first, never heard of it before? Why was the tape so abruptly terminated (cut) while I was presumably saying positive things? I hear there are other clients and many reporters that are taped – can this be so? Too bad!
“What kind of a lawyer would tape a client?” Trump tweeted. “So sad! Is this a first, never heard of it before? Why was the tape so abruptly terminated (cut) while I was presumably saying positive things? I hear there are other clients and many reporters that are taped — can this be so?”
The following article by Sarah Ellison was posted on the Washington Post website June 21, 2018:
During the presidential campaign, National Enquirer executives sent digital copies of the tabloid’s articles and cover images related to Donald Trump and his political opponents to Trump’s attorney Michael Cohen in advance of publication, according to three people with knowledge of the matter — an unusual practice that speaks to the close relationship between Trump and David Pecker, chief executive of American Media Inc., the Enquirer’s parent company.
The following article by Ronan Farrow was posted on the New Yorker website February 16, 2018:
One woman’s account of clandestine meetings, financial transactions, and legal pacts designed to hide an extramarital affair.
At right, from the top, David Pecker, the chairman of American Media, Inc., the publisher of the National Enquirer; Karen McDougal, a former Playmate of the Year; Donald Trump; and Dylan Howard, A.M.I.’s chief content officer.Illustration by Oliver Munday; Source Photographs: Jesse Grant / WireImage / Getty (McDougal); Mark Peterson / Redux for The New Yorker (Pecker); Jamie Squire / Getty (Trump); Lucas Jackson / Reuters (Howard)
In June, 2006, Donald Trump taped an episode of his reality-television show, “The Apprentice,” at the Playboy Mansion, in Los Angeles. Hugh Hefner, Playboy’s publisher, threw a pool party for the show’s contestants with dozens of current and former Playmates, including Karen McDougal, a slim brunette who had been named Playmate of the Year, eight years earlier. In 2001, the magazine’s readers voted her runner-up for “Playmate of the ’90s,” behind Pamela Anderson. At the time of the party, Trump had been married to the Slovenian model Melania Knauss for less than two years; their son, Barron, was a few months old. Trump seemed uninhibited by his new family obligations. McDougal later wrote that Trump “immediately took a liking to me, kept talking to me – telling me how beautiful I was, etc. It was so obvious that a Playmate Promotions exec said, ‘Wow, he was all over you – I think you could be his next wife.’
Trump and McDougal began an affair, which McDougal later memorialized in an eight-page, handwritten document provided to The New Yorker by John Crawford, a friend of McDougal’s. When I showed McDougal the document, she expressed surprise that I had obtained it but confirmed that the handwriting was her own. Continue reading “Donald Trump, a Playboy Model and a System for Concealing Infidelity”
Karen McDougal — a former Playboy model who Donald Trump 
