The Enquirer never published the story, but the tactic is known in tabloid circles as “catch and kill.”
The Journal’s article was posted online just after 9pm on Friday night, but did not appear on the front page of the next day’s print edition. There was almost no coverage from other major media outlets. Perhaps they could not match it. Perhaps they were reluctant to publish scandalous articles so close to the election. Maybe they were just tired. As two Journal reporters, Joe Palazzolo and Michael Rosfeld, later wrote in their book The Fixers, then-Trump lawyer Michael Cohen boasted to his colleagues: [is] We’re not talking about that. ”
Well, CNN and everyone else is talking about this right now. Throughout the day, I was engrossed in live blog updates and podcasts as Judge Juan Marchan’s hush money trial progressed in a Manhattan courtroom.
The reversal is the handiwork of New York’s competitive media scene., And this trial, with all its details about the Trump-Cohen AMI program, provides a good opportunity to assess this fascinating and enduring story. As scoop after scoop followed through two criminal investigations, the verdict was almost uniformly positive. A less shiny aspect relates to the capture-and-kill operation that crushed vile claims against Trump by a former Trump World Tower doorman. Major media outlets had confirmed parts of the story, but either refused to publish it or dragged their feet.
Now, the doorman’s story is unfolding in court documents and testimony. A warning to careless editors. As with any prosecutor taking up a story deemed unfit for public consumption, there are risks associated with killing newsworthy information.
While Trump has built a myth of lying, inducing, and even faking his own misrepresentations to deceive New York beat reporters, this is not a piece about his love life or new developments in Manhattan. As Trump sought and secured a more serious position, namely the presidency, the New York media led itself to borrow bullying language from Cohen himself. They used their resources and patience to crush the story and keep it moving until the end.
One lesson that emerges from the timeline is that President Trump’s best strategy for suppressing one scandal is to flood the public sphere with others. But over time, sources loosen up, people get tired of being silenced, and journalists get their stories figured out. It’s a dynamic that President Trump foresaw in 2016 when he discussed the McDougal capture with then-publisher David Pecker. Questioner.
“Mr. Trump told me, “I don’t buy any articles.” If you do something like this, you’re going to get caught,” Pecker said in trial testimony this week.
In a November 2016 article on underrated, the Journal put a riddle before its readers and competitors. The newspaper noted that the lawyer who represented McDougal, Keith Davidson, also represents former adult film star Stormy Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, regarding her past relationship with President Trump. He said he had talked to ABC about elaborating, but said he had “lost contact” with President Trump. network. It would take another 15 months for the Journal to flesh out the details of the $130,000 hush money Cohen paid Daniels, a key aspect of the Manhattan trial.
Because it’s Donald Trump. Never before has a president made triage for journalists so complicated. Since his presidential transition, Mr. Trump and his allies have been primed for unusual events and odd comments multiple times a week. What will it cover? Well, Rosfeld and Palazzolo’s byline in 2017 included articles about the Steele dossier, Trump Organization deals, Paul Manafort’s finances, potential corporate wrongdoing, the National Rifle Association, and more. The pair also spent time investigating rumors about a tape that allegedly shows President Trump abusing his wife Melania in an elevator, but said, “Ultimately, the so-called elevator tape is not a ghost. “I began to doubt that,” they wrote in The Fixers.
But in late 2017, when reporters discovered Daniels’ story had been interrupted, they called him back. However, selectively. “We were very careful not to do anything that would alarm our competitors,” Rosfeld said, adding that he refrained from calling sources who might abuse them. Ta.One they are did it He was secretly looking for the name of the shell company that Cohen used to repay Daniels. Although they did not know the LLC’s name or the state in which it was registered, they gathered helpful clues from sources and obtained critical assistance from generous officials in the Delaware Division of Corporations. Eventually, they found what seemed to be a suitable shell company.
mistaken! They stumble upon a vulnerable corporate infrastructure. different A hush-hush job. Soon, they found a suitable LLC and prevented any connection to Cohen and Daniels’ operation.
On January 12, 2018, the Journal debunked the article with a report about Mr. Cohen funneling payments to Daniels (a later article added the LLC section). Palazzolo and Rosfeld recalled hearing no “footsteps” from other media outlets following the story, but the New York Times published its own article a little more than two hours later, citing the magazine’s story. reported on Daniels’ discussions with Slate and ABC News. She shares her experience along with details of her contract. The Times team has been working on this issue for several weeks.
Scramble signal. Palazzolo and Rosfeld compiled articles on the Cohen conspiracy, including scoops on the LLC. The Times’ Maggie Haberman, a veteran Trump expert, reported that Cohen lined his own pockets to pay Daniels. Five Times reporters: Jim Rutenberg (who previously reported on Trump), Megan Toohey (who just broke the wall of silence with the paper’s Harvey Weinstein investigation), Rebecca Lewis, and Mike. – McIntyre, Haberman — submitted comprehensive testimony from Mr. Cohen. Hush money works. The New Yorker’s Ronan Farrow scooped McDougal’s first public comments on the AMI deal. The Journal’s coverage of Cohen’s “awkward defection” and struggle to get President Trump’s attention is one of a collection of Pulitzer Prize-winning national reporting by Palazzolo, Rosfeld and other Journal reporters.
All three news organizations continued their work for months, but their journalistic endeavors hit unique obstacles. It was the master liars of Cohen and Trump, the tabloids that hid secrets and arcane contracts, and the physical challenges of covering porn stars. On that final front, a platoon of reporters descended on a Greenville, South Carolina, club in January 2018 to watch Daniels perform on his “Make America Horny Again” tour. During the performance, Palazzolo recalls being surrounded by other journalists around the stage. Daniels grabbed the man’s head and pulled him to his chest, an action known in the industry as “motorboating,” police said. In the documentary “Stormy,” available on the Peacock streaming service, Palazzolo and Rosfeld claim that the physical immersion was not done at Palazzolo’s request. “The only reason I was there was to try to get a comment from her,” Palazzolo said, adding that Daniels “purred in her ear.” .
One journalist at the scene told me he was tired of seeing another journalist tell the story in that way. Another person present backed up the Journal reporter’s version, commenting that Daniels was a “key stakeholder” in the episode. In any case, the Dow Jones Code of Conduct does not mention motorboats.
All this strange labor had an amazing result. Cohen pleaded guilty in August 2018 to federal crimes stemming from, among other things, the hush money scheme. Subsequently, prosecutors entered into a non-prosecution agreement with AMI. Now, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s prosecution has focused the scandal on Trump.
One of them was doorman Dino Sajudin, who reported to the Enquirer in 2015 that he had heard that Trump fathered a “love child” with a Trump employee in the late 1980s. In fact, the Enquirer sent reporters to support this claim, and one of them called Trump’s assistant for information, which prompted an outcry from Cohen. Sajudin ended up paying $30,000 for exclusive rights to his article. This includes a $1 million penalty if the information is leaked to other media outlets. The Enquirer subsequently stopped reporting on the film, giving the impression that the entire sequence was a capture-and-kill operation.
The Journal began working on Sajudin’s article after the 2016 presidential election. Among the challenges faced was a fierce backlash from AMI, which claimed that the reason it did not publish the story was because it could not prove it.
Wait a minute, when did investigators start caring about facts? In that spirit, the Journal sent a letter to AMI regarding the evidentiary standards for Sajudin’s article and the Enquirer’s 2015 “investigation.” It has been revealed that Hillary Clinton has six months to live.. That salvo drew threats from AMI. The bigger concern, as explained in “The Fixers,” is that the Journal, as well as other outlets that later leaned into the story, came up short in trying to shed light on Trump’s paternity allegations. is. Journal reporters have come to agree with AMI that the explosive claims are false, Palazzolo said.
Additionally, Palazzolo said he did not know at the time the extent of Cohen’s involvement with Trump.
So the Journal ignored the story. “I felt like there was an article there, but the paper asked me not to run it,” said Rosfeld, who moved from the Journal to the Times in 2019. People will assume it’s true even if it doesn’t seem to be true. ” Palazzolo said it was a “close call.”
The Associated Press began working on AMI’s approach to Sajuddin’s “beloved child” claim in the summer of 2017. Mr. Farrow reported that shortly before the news agency published its findings, AMI began a legal denial operation. A few weeks later, Sally Buzbee, then the editor-in-chief of the Associated Press (and now the Post’s top editor), announced that the article would not be published, although she denied that outside opposition forced her to make the decision. . The AP finally pulled the trigger in April 2018, after Mr. Farrow orchestrated AMI’s efforts to block the AP and attempted to expose his own account. Buzbee told me in 2021 that this story received significant support from a federal investigation. Two officials said the situation had not changed much.
The Times has independently pursued the doorman case since late 2017, covering details such as contractual elements and Cohen’s role in the incident, according to people familiar with the matter. The Times decided not to publish this article. (Former Politico Media reporter Michael Calderone reported on the Times decision years ago.)
“Love Child”‘s cautious approach to the story has aged and fallen into disarray. After all, the Sajudin story was incorporated into Mr. Bragg’s factual statement as an example of hiding “damaging information from voters” before the 2016 presidential election. In other words, the mass manipulation scheme was newsworthy from the beginning, but the underlying “beloved child” claims were unfounded. Trump lives in the mud. Sometimes journalists have to go into the pond to serve the public.
