First Witness in Trump Trial Sets Stage for Future Testimonies

A tabloid publisher testified how he helped Trump’s 2016 campaign.

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Donald Trump again criticized the trial as an attempt to interfere with his presidential bid.

If last week’s process of selecting jurors was a kind of prologue to the criminal trial of Donald Trump, today marked the robust beginning of the first act, complete with introduction of the plot and foreshadowing of future drama.

The government’s first witness, David Pecker, the former publisher of The National Enquirer, had laid out the basics of his résumé and his style of “checkbook journalism” in about 30 minutes of testimony yesterday.

But today was a longer, more in-depth session, running about two and a half hours. Pecker set the stage for future testimony by other witnesses and plunged into a crucial element in the state’s case: that Trump worked with allies like Pecker on “catch-and-kill,” shorthand for buying and then burying potentially unflattering stories.

It was a fascinating dive, including Pecker’s narrative of agreeing during a meeting at Trump Tower in August 2015 — not long after Trump had descended his building’s golden escalator and launched his presidential campaign — to be the “eyes and ears” of the Trump campaign, keeping a lookout for rumors in what he called “the marketplace,” where salacious tales are bought and sold.

Pecker’s main contact in many of these dealings was Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer and fixer, who is now expected to be a key witness against him.

In particular, Pecker said that he was to alert Cohen for stories involving women in Trump’s life, noting that the then-candidate was “well known as the most eligible bachelor” who “dated the most beautiful women.”

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