Trump Howls As Pecker Leaks All Over Grand Jury

These headlines really write themselves.

Dear God, the fate of the country is in the hands of a guy whose business model relied on paying a few thousand dollars for stories about celebrities, and then locking up those stories in a safe to use as leverage over the celebrities. And his name is literally a synonym for penis.

We're talking of course about David Pecker, the former publisher of the National Enquirer and head of American Media Inc. You can read about the sordid history of Trump's Pecker Protector here , in case you don't remember every detail from 2018. Pecker was a key player in the conspiracy with the Trump Organization and the Trump campaign to buy up stories that might embarrass Trump during the 2016 election and make sure they never saw the light of day. He was given immunity by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, and his testimony helped implicate "Individual 1" in Michael Cohen's guilty plea.

In 2016, after arranging to buy Stormy Daniels's story about bumping bits with Trump a decade earlier, Pecker pulled out of the deal, fearing that it might violate campaign finance laws. Instead, Cohen tapped his home equity line and paid Daniels the $130,000 himself. Flash forward five years, and Pecker is once again spilling his load (sorry, not sorry), this time before the Manhattan grand jury investigating Trump for falsifying business records to hide the reimbursement to Cohen, made in a series of $35,000 checks totaling $420,000, to cover Cohen's tax liability as well as $50,000 he'd paid to a guy from Liberty University to rig an online poll.

As Rudy Giuliani famously admitted to Sean Hannity on air, "When I heard of Cohen’s retainer for $130,000, he was doing no work for the president. I said, 'Well, that’s how he’s repaying it, with a little profit and a little margin for paying taxes for Michael.'" And five minutes later, the law firm Greenberg Traurig decided it didn't want to work with Rudy any more. Go know!

And speaking of lawyers who have lost their damn minds , Joseph Tacopina spent the entire weekend hopping from television studio to television studio trying to convince someone — anyone — that Trump can't be prosecuted for violating campaign finance law because he used "personal funds" to reimburse Michael Cohen. As if the predicate crime here wasn't falsification of business records because Trump paid Cohen using Trump Organization funds and described them as a business expense.

Here's Tacos getting spanked by Al Sharpton on MSNBC.

None

— (@)  

"You have a lawyer who paid a woman 10 years after the alleged sex act, right before an election, and he was reimbursed by your client. How is that not a prima facia case for the grand jury?" demanded Sharpton.

Tacopina insisted again that it was "clearly not" because "this was paid with personal funds" to "prevent embarrassment to himself and his family."

"Even Michael Cohen said that under oath when he pled guilty," the lawyer insisted. Although he omitted to mention that Cohen admitted that the entire scheme was part of a conspiracy with Pecker and the campaign to protect Trump. FFS, the first person who Michael Cohen told that he'd completed the payment was Kellyanne Conway.

And speaking of Kellyanne ... guess who else testified to the grand jury in recent days?

 CNN reports that the grand jury, which meets Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, but not always on the subject of Trump, heard from Pecker yesterday and is scheduled to convene again tomorrow. Because, although Trump and his minions seem very hot to discredit Cohen as a liar and a fraud, DA Alvin Bragg is clearly going to corroborate everything Cohen says with documents and other witnesses. Whether Pecker will have the juice to get the grand jury over the finish line has yet to be determined. Here's hoping we get a big indictment money shot later this week.

LOCK HIM UP.

[ CNN ]

Catch Liz Dye on Opening Arguments podcast.

Click the widget to keep your Wonkette ad-free and feisty. And if you're ordering from Amazon, use this link, because reasons .