2016 ELECTION/MEDIA/MICHAEL COHEN/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “The National Enquirer’s parent company has agreed to tell prosecutors everything it knows about Donald Trump — and it might know a lot. In a court document released Wednesday [12-12-18], the tabloid publisher, American Media Inc., admitted to coordinating a hush-money payment with Trump’s 2016 campaign, reversing two years of denials. The confession came as part of an immunity agreement with the U.S. attorney’s office in New York, made public shortly after Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, was sentenced to three years in prison over charges of tax fraud, campaign finance violations and lying to Congress. But the disclosure might just be scratching the surface. Based on court documents and a plethora of media reports, Trump and his aides have worked for years with the tabloid to kill incriminating stories. AMI’s CEO David Pecker also had a decades-long copacetic friendship with Trump. Legal experts say that could mean more legal peril for Trump, who has already been implicated in directing Cohen to work with the National Enquirer during the 2016 campaign to pay women in exchange for their silence about alleged affairs.”
–Darren Samuelsohn, “A ‘loud gong’: National Enquirer’s surprise deal could imperil Trump,” Politico, December 12, 2018 7:11 pm