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 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.