The story of how The National Enquirer’s owner bought and spiked a story about an alleged Donald Trump “love child” is now roiling the media world, as The Associated Press acknowledged having decided not to publish it last August, before turning around and doing so on Thursday morning. Other outlets now admit they, too, had worked on the story before backing off.
Meanwhile, The New Yorker rushed to publish its own version right after the AP. And Radar, a gossip site that shares an owner with the Enquirer, attempted to head off both outlets by publishing a piece casting doubt on the claims of a “disaffected” former Trump employee.
Story Continued Below
The odd spectacle of news organizations both acknowledging their restraint in reporting a story, but then competing to put it out seemed to illustrate the media’s challenges in the Trump era, in which salacious allegations are often bandied about, while the efforts of the president and his allies to control the media narrative are often news in themselves.
“Publishing a story on a payment made to hush a rumor that may be accurate, partly accurate or not accurate at all is not an easy call, and we were aware that other news orgs struggled with it before not publishing,” said AP reporter Jeff Horwitz, who reported the story last summer. “We’re glad the story’s out.”
That story took an odd path from the kill file to the news wire, complete with tension-filled decisions along the way.
In August, AP Executive Editor Sally Buzbee informed colleagues on a conference call that their monthslong investigation into how the Enquirer-parent company American Media Inc. had bought and squashed the love-child story during the 2016 election would not be published.
The decision frustrated many in the newsroom who believed the AP’s story, buttressed by extensive sources and documentation, was rock solid and clearly newsworthy. Horwitz even left the AP newsroom for several days after the decision before being persuaded by management to return, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter.
Horwitz’s story, co-written with colleague Jake Pearson, was finally published around 1 a.m. Thursday. They reported that American Media Inc. paid $30,000 to Dino Sajudin, a former doorman at a Trump building, for the rights to a rumor that Trump had fathered a child decades back with a former employee. Sajudin could be forced to pay $1 million if he broke the agreement, they reported.
The New Yorker’s Ronan Farrow followed up just a couple hours later with his own detailed story on the payment to Sajudin. Both the AP and The New Yorker reported that Michael Cohen, Trump’s personal lawyer, had some involvement in the situation between the magazine and Sajudin. However, AMI denied Thursday that Trump or Cohen “had anything to do with its decision not to pursue a story about a ‘love child’ that it determined was not credible.”
Cohen is in the spotlight this week as FBI agents raided his home and office, reportedly in search of records of payments to two women who have alleged to have affairs with Trump: Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal. Cohen has admitted to paying Daniels $130,000 shortly before the election for her silence; American Media Inc. paid McDougal $150,000 for her story during the 2016 race but did not publish it. The FBI has reportedly also sought Cohen’s correspondence with David Pecker, a Trump friend and CEO of AMI, and AMI chief content officer Dylan Howard.
Farrow also reported that representatives from the AP met with AMI’s legal team last summer as the news organization seemed poised to publish the story. A source with knowledge of the matter said the meeting took place on July 13, 2017 and included Buzbee, the AP’s general counsel and AMI’s representatives — and that it had been preceded by tense exchanges between the two sides. Buzbee eventually spiked the story nearly a month after that meeting, though maintains her decision wasn’t motivated by any pushback.
“We frequently face intense pressure from outsiders attempting to influence our journalism and we do not back down,” Buzbee said in a statement. “No outside pressure drove this decision in any way.”
“After robust internal discussion, AP news leaders determined that the story at the time did not meet AP’s rigorous sourcing requirements, despite strong and persistent reporting by our journalists,” she added.
Horowitz told POLITICO that the AP “spent a long while reporting out the details of The National Enquirer’s deep-sixing of Trump stories, and the bigger picture of how it weighed into the 2016 election.”
Indeed, the AP and New Yorker each made clear in their stories there isn’t evidence to support the love-child rumor and their focus was on Trump’s relationship to AMI and the “capture and kill” practice of removing potentially damaging stories from circulation.
Buzbee cited the recent news about the FBI raid and the McDougal payment as having “bolstered the previous AP reporting.” Now, she added, “the story met our standards and we published it.”
Other news outlets, including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, had also chased the story. The Journal first reported on AMI buying McDougal’s story days before the 2016 election and broke the news in January that Cohen arranged for the payment to Daniels. The paper had investigated the love-child story as well, but didn’t publish it.
“We investigated the paternity claim and what we found did not meet our high standards for fair and accurate reporting,” a Journal spokesman told POLITICO. The spokesman noted that the Journal published the McDougal and Daniels stories “in the face of substantial pushback.”
New York Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet declined to discuss the paper’s handling of the story. “We have been very aggressive and competitive on this story,” he said. “But as a rule we don’t talk about reporting that hasn’t been published.” (The Times did run a front-page story Thursday on how the Enquirer has been swept up in the federal probe of Cohen, though didn’t mention the payment to the doorman.)
As the AP and New Yorker neared publication, AMI-owned Radar published its story on the payment: “Prez Love Child Shocker! Ex-Trump Worker Peddling Rumor Donald Has Illegitimate Child.”
Farrow wrote that the Radar story went online a half hour after he approached AMI for comment for his story. The Radar piece noted Farrow was calling inside the company. It also included documentation about the payment as well as results of Sajudin’s polygraph. His passing the test indicates he is being truthful about hearing the rumor, but doesn’t substantiate it.
In a Thursday statement, Sajudin said he was “instructed not to criticize President Trump’s former housekeeper due to a prior relationship she had with President Trump which produced a child.”
He did not say who had instructed him, or offer any further details of his agreement with AMI.
Howard defended the Enquirer’s handling of the rumor on Thursday and took a shot at news organizations scrutinizing its actions.
“It is a disconcerting view of the level of hysteria and partisanship in American politics that not reporting a story that multiple media outlets have now also confirmed to be untrue has become headline news,” he said.
As the clock was running out on George W. Bush’s presidency in late 2008, the president and the vice president edged closer to a showdown.
A year earlier, a Washington jury had delivered a guilty verdict in a case against I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby. Vice President Richard B. Cheney’s former chief of staff and one of the architects of the Iraq War, Libby was convicted of lying to a grand jury investigating the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame.
While his White House was being packed up in boxes, Bush mulled candidates for presidential pardons. Cheney personally pushed for Libby. To the vice president and others in his orbit, Libby’s conviction was the product of an overzealous special prosecutor and a liberal Washington jury — a “witch-hunt,” as numerous conservative commentators wrote.
The vice president pushed hard.
“Cheney really got in the President’s face,” a source told Time Magazine. “He just wouldn’t give it up.”
But Bush was leery of lifting the felony convictions from the former White House official. The issue finally climaxed in a meeting in the final days of the presidency. The relationship between Bush and Cheney — two allies who had piloted the country through the rubble of the 9/11 attacks, and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq — reportedly never recovered.
Now President Trump may have decided to do what Bush would not.
On Thursday night, The Washington Post’s Josh Dawsey and Philip Rucker reported the president is planning to pardon Libby. “It is unclear why Trump is making the move, but the pardon has been under consideration for several months,” The Post reported.
The unfinished business of the Libby conviction has been a longtime rallying point for conservatives, including current members of Trump’s administration. The right’s narrative about Libby — that he was railroaded by an overreaching, politically-driven special prosecutor — syncs with Trump’s view of his own predicament, as special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s continues to dig into Trump’s world. “A TOTAL WITCH HUNT!!!” the president has tweeted about the Mueller investigation.
Libby was a prominent Washington lawyer with blue-chip credentials — Phillips Academy, Yale University, Columbia University’s law school. According to the Post, his former political science teacher, the neoconservative Paul Wolfowitz, urged Libby to work in government. During the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, Libby served in both the state and defense departments on foreign policy issues.
In the George W. Bush White House, Libby was a close confidante of Cheney. Along with Wolfowitz, Condoleezza Rice, and others, he was a key member of the neoconservative clique within the administration pushing for an aggressive expansion of American interests abroad. They were called “the Vulcans.” The brainy and brawny ideology was the architecture behind the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Libby’s trouble began with the drumbeat leading up to the invasion of Iraq. As the Post previously reported, in January 2003, President Bush used his State of the Union address to justify military action against Saddam Hussain’s regime. The president told the country Iraq officials had attempted to purchase yellowcake uranium in Niger.
Six months later, the New York Times published an opinion piece by former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV. In the article, Wilson recounted a 2002 trip he made to Niger to substantiate the allegations, later finding them to be false, the Post reported.
On July 14, syndicated columnist Robert Novak penned a column outing Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, as a CIA “operative.” The CIA requested a Department of Justice investigation into the naming of Plame as an agent — a breach of classified information. An FBI investigation started into whether Plame’s identity was leaked to reporters as political payback for her husband’s public challenge to the administration.
“My name and identity were carelessly and recklessly abused by senior government officials in both the White House and the State Department,” Plame would later say before Congress.
By the end of 2003, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft recused himself from the case.
That left the decision on how to proceed to the deputy attorney general — a man named James B. Comey.
The future-FBI director appointed Patrick J. Fitzgerald, a U.S. attorney from Chicago, as special counsel.
The grand jury investigated the leaks. Both President Bush and Vice President Cheney were interviewed by Fitzgerald. No one was ever charged for outing Plame, but Libby was charged with federal obstruction of justice and perjury charges for lying to investigators.
In March 2007, Libby was found guilty on four felony counts, becoming the highest-ranking White House official convicted since the Iran-contra scandal in the 1980s. He lost his appeal that summer, and a judge sentenced Libby to a 30-month sentence and fined him $250,000.
In July 2007, President Bush commuted Libby’s sentence, saying in a statement he had “respect” for the jury’s verdict but found the prison sentence “excessive.” The commutation, however, left Libby with the large fine and two-years of probation — a teed up the conflict between Bush and Cheney in the last days of the administration.
As the Bush team prepared to exit the White House, Cheney continued to urge for a full pardon for his former staffer, giving the cause an “extraordinary level of attention,” an insider told Time.
Bush was cautious about pardons an administration official told Time, and Libby failed to meet the president’s own criteria. “Pardons tend to be for the repentant . . . not for those who think the system was politicized or they were unfairly targeted.”
In an Oval Office meeting, Cheney tried once more to pursued the president. According to Time, he argued Libby was a loyal team player who had been made into a political fall guy. Fred F. Fielding, the White House counsel, argued against the pardon. Bush eventually sided with Fielding.
Only months after leaving the White House, Cheney expressed his frustration with Bush’s decision. “I was clearly not happy that we, in effect, left Scooter sort of hanging in the wind, which I didn’t think was appropriate,” he told CNN.
Other Bush loyalists also expressed their frustration — including a number who are now in Trump’s orbit.
“Somebody’s going to have to ask President Bush why he went out of his way to say he respected the jury’s verdict,” John R. Bolton, Bush’s UN ambassador and Trump’s new national security adviser, said at the time. “If you think it was a miscarriage of justice, then you think it shouldn’t have gone to a jury to begin with.”
Alan Dershowitz, a vocal Trump defender on cable television, also pushed Libby’s appellate cause, calling his appeals “serious and substantial” and filing a brief in 2007 asking for Libby to be granted bail pending his appeal.
Victoria Toensing and Joe DiGenova, the husband and wife attorney team Trump considered hiring earlier this year, are also vocal Libby backers.
When Libby got his law license back in 2016, DiGenova told the Daily Caller: “Comey and Fitzgerald tried to frame Scooter Libby, and they did, but then they didn’t get it done. And then of course that idiot George W. Bush didn’t give him a pardon he only commuted his sentence.”
