The Associated Press reports that leading up to the 2016 election, the National Enquirer kept a safe full of documents on hush money payments and other damaging stories that the publication never ran to maintain a friendly relationship with Donald Trump.
A literal fucking safe. Like, the shit you see in cartoons. A safe. No encrypted computer files. A safe. Someone printed that shit out, and put ‘em in a safe.
This comes just after Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, pled guilty to campaign finance violations charges alleging that he—along with Donald Trump and the Enquirer—bought the silence of Stormy Daniels, an adult film actress who says she had an affair with Trump.
From AP:
The Trump records were stored alongside similar documents pertaining to other celebrities’ catch-and-kill deals, in which exclusive rights to people’s stories were bought with no intention of publishing to keep them out of the news. By keeping celebrities’ embarrassing secrets, the company was able to ingratiate itself with them and ask for favors in return.
But after The Wall Street Journal initially published the first details of Playboy model Karen McDougal’s catch-and-kill deal shortly before the 2016 election, those assets became a liability. Fearful that the documents might be used against American Media, Pecker and the company’s chief content officer, Dylan Howard, removed them from the safe in the weeks before Trump’s inauguration, according to one person directly familiar with the events.
But the AP goes on to note that it’s unclear if the documents were destroyed or simply moved to another safe. Perhaps a bigger safe. Or a safe within a safe within a safe.
I, along with the New York Post and the American fucking people just wanna know…