The New York Times reports that the publisher of the National Enquirer, American Media Inc., has been fined $187,500 after the Federal Election Commission (FEC) found that it “knowingly and willfully” violated campaign law by paying $150,000 to a former Playboy model who said she’d had an affair with Donald Trump to keep quiet during the 2016 presidential election.
The FEC found that American Media Inc. and its former chief executive, David Pecker, had “knowingly and willfully” violated campaign laws by secretly routing the $150,000 payment to Karen McDougal “in coordination with senior officials with the Trump campaign, including Michael D. Cohen, who served as Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer at the time,” the outlet reports.
“The idea behind the payment scheme — a method known as “catch and kill” — had been to buy the rights to Ms. McDougal’s story and then never publish it,” the report continues. “The details of the effort came out widely in 2018 during Mr. Cohen’s federal trial for, among other things, campaign finance violations.”
Campaign finance laws prohibit corporations from cooperating with a campaign to affect an election.
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‘American Media, the parent company of The National Enquirer, acknowledged in the settlement that the commission had found that the company made an illegal and undisclosed corporate contribution to influence the 2016 election, though the firm did not admit to the violations being “knowing and willful,”‘ the report continues.
The FEC disagreed.
“The available information supports the conclusion that AMI’s [American Media, Inc.’s] payment constituted an in-kind contribution to Trump and the Trump Committee,” the FEC wrote. “AMI and Pecker appear to have violated the Act by making and consenting to making a corporate contribution in the form of a payment from AMI to McDougal. As explained below, the record indicates that there is reason to believe that this violation was knowing and willful.”
The Times reports that Trump isn’t facing further investigation concerning the payment to McDougal, and I’m not sure how the twice-impeached one-term president appears to be able to avoid accountability for his actions.
Oh, this is the reason:
The F.E.C. did not have sufficient votes from its commissioners to move forward with an inquiry looking into Mr. Trump’s role. The six-member commission is divided between three Republican-aligned commissioners and three Democratic-aligned ones.
Trump and Pecker had been friends, and the former president even said on more than one occasion that he thought the tabloid deserved journalism’s highest honor, the Pulitzer Prize.
You can read the full report here.
Featured image via screen captures
