Two of the president’s men jumped into the storm celler this week and locked it behind them to escape the legal storm tornadoing down on President Donald Trump.
On Friday we learned that Allen Weisselberg, the Trump Organization’s long-time financial consigliere and keeper of all of Trump’s personal money secrets, had accepted immunity from federal prosecutors in return for information on Michael Cohen. Cohen, his former attorney and go-to fixer, pleaded guilty this week to two felony campaign finance charges and claimed that Trump directed him to make the illegal hush-money payouts. Trump’s long-time friend and ally David Pecker, whose National Enquirer served as a sort of Pravda for the Trump campaign and the early months of his presidency, also grabbed the immunity life-ring.
Just a couple of days before the two Trump associates agreed to cooperate with prosecutors in exchange for information of value to the feds, the president expressed his disdain for “flippers,” as he calls them, to Fox News. The practice of trading testimony for immunity or a lesser charge “almost ought to be illegal,” Trump insisted. The president has been silent about the latest flippers, but their betrayal must have stung with the pain of a reopened wound. Add to the excitement the best-selling treacheries of Omarosa Manigault Newman, the conviction of former campaign manager Paul Manafort (who has resisted, so far, pressure to turn on Trump), and the news that White House counsel Don McGahn spent 30 hours talking to the special counsel, you’ve probably looking at the Trump presidency’s worst week. His best line of defense is probably a wave of pardons, but that might cause political insurrection among a majority of voters who don’t look kindly on that kind of executive privilege.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Pecker has shared with prosecutors “Mr. Trump’s knowledge of the deals.” But Pecker knows much more about Trump than the hush-money deal Pecker’s company set up for Playboy model Karen McDougal, an alleged ex-lover of Trump’s. The Associated Press reports that the National Enquirer kept “documents on hush money and other damaging stories it killed” related to Trump stored in a company safe.
“The Trump records were stored alongside similar documents pertaining to other celebrities’ catch-and-kill deals, in which exclusive rights to people’s stories were bought with no intention of publishing to keep them out of the news. By keeping celebrities’ embarrassing secrets, the company was able to ingratiate itself with them and ask for favors in return,” the AP reported.
Michael Cohen | Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/Getty Images
Pecker was smart to swing an immunity deal. While a publication has a First Amendment right to support one candidate over another (the National Enquirer endorsed Trump and brutalized Hillary Clinton) and a First Amendment right not to publish something, Pecker appears to have used “catch and kill” cash to suppress information with the direct intention of aiding a campaign. He could have, I suppose, spent the money to line up legal talent to argue for a First Amendment privilege to spend corporate funds to — in consultation and cooperation with the affected candidate’s campaign — squelch a story. Instead, he took the easier and cheaper route by accepting immunity.
The tergiversation of Weisselberg, Cohen, and Pecker reveals Trump’s finances and whatever scandalous behavior locked in the National Enquirer vault to the inquiries of prosecutors, both the U.S. attorneys at the Southern District of New York and special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. But their decisions to flip on the president signal to remaining Trump loyalists that it’s time to seek safer ground. Think of the Trump administration as the space shuttle Columbia and Weisselberg, Cohen, and Pecker as ceramic titles breaking off as the craft reenters the atmosphere. Catastrophic failure awaits anybody stupid enough to stay on board. The Trump administration has become a plummeting death ship and the space force he dreams of building won’t be able to scramble its rescue pods in time to save him.
Weisselberg, who has worked for the Trumps since the 1970s and is identified as “Executive-1” in Michael Cohen’s plea agreement, stands to do the most lasting legal damage to Trump. He currently runs the Trump Organization alongside Trump’s two eldest sons and served as the treasurer of Trump’s foundation, currently under investigation for corruption by the New York attorney general. “Weisselberg has detailed information about the Trump Organization’s operations, business deals and finances,” Bloomberg View columnist Timothy L. O’Brien wrote last month. “He has paid household bills, made large purchases for Trump, and has communicated with Trump’s outside investment advisers.”
Like the National Enquirer vault that teems with damaging stories about Trump, the Weisselberg cranium bulges with whatever financial transgressions Trump may have committed over the decades, including the transfer of hush-money to McDougal. How intimate was Weisselberg with Trump’s finances? The tycoon summoned him to his office when Trump was in deep money trouble in the early 1990s and the banks had cut off funding. According to Trump’s 2004 book, Think Like a Billionaire, Weisselberg said, “No problem,” and “went back to his office, where he proceeded to renegotiate almost every payment from that point forward.”
“The only reason then they would give immunity to Mr. Weissleberg is if they were looking beyond Michael Cohen,” Stormy Daniels’ attorney Michael Avenatti told MSNBC. “There’s only one person that is likely to be and that is Donald Trump.”
Money trails provide the best lens for viewing a person’s secret life, especially a figure like Trump who has always favored creative accounting. By enlisting Weisselberg, federal prosecutors will now be able to see through the walls Trump has erected around his financial conduct. As he grows more desperate, what might he do? Is it too late for a Reichstag fire?
Jack Shafer is POLITICO’s senior media writer.