Inside the secret meeting where Donald Trump’s ‘catch and kill’ trial began

Just a few months after the Trump Tower meeting, a man named Dino Sajudin, who worked as a doorman at another Manhattan building owned by Trump, phoned the Enquirer’s tip line claiming to have information about Trump fathering an out-of-wedlock child.

The first criminal trial of an ex–U.S. president is scheduled to start on Monday, but the seeds for it were planted just two months after Donald Trump announced his first White House campaign in June 2015.

It was at a secret meeting in Trump Tower in August of that year that a plot to make damaging stories quietly go away was allegedly hatched. The meeting took place 56 floors above the famed golden escalator Trump rode down to declare that presidential run, and would set the stage for Trump’s criminal trial set to begin in Manhattan next week.

At the meeting, Trump pal and supporter David Pecker, then the chief executive of American Media Inc., which published the National Enquirer and a host of other supermarket tabloids, agreed to serve as the “eyes and ears” for the Trump campaign and alert Trump’s bulldog lawyer, Michael Cohen, of any negative stories about the real-estate mogul being shopped around, according to court documents.

The arrangement, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said, would lead to a series of hush-money payments to buy the stories and not publish them, a political dark-arts practice known as a catch-and-kill.

The crime, prosecutors say, came when Trump tried to hide his reimbursement of a $130,000 payment by Cohen — to bury a story on adult-film star Stormy Daniels alleging a sexual encounter with Trump — as being for “legal services rendered.” 

In April 2023, Trump was indicted on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.

Trump, who is the presumptive Republican nominee for president once again this year, has pleaded not guilty and insisted that the charges brought by Bragg, a Democrat, are politically motivated.

The payment to Stormy Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, was the last of three made through the catch-and-kill arrangement with Pecker, prosecutors said.

The doorman

The Enquirer’s editors had reporters meet with Sajudin and had him submit to a lie-detector test. Even though the tabloid’s editors were doubtful about the story — and would eventually deem it untrue — Pecker ordered them to pay Sajudin $30,000 for it, prosecutors said. 

In return, they had Sajudin sign an agreement saying he couldn’t discuss what he claimed to know with anyone else, or he would have to pay a $1 million penalty.

The Playboy bunny

Trump has denied the affair.

American Media agreed to pay McDougal $150,000 for the story, plus an arrangement for her to write a series of fitness columns for some of the publisher’s other magazines. Her story was then put on ice, prosecutors said.

Cohen would later set up a shell company called Resolution Consultants LLC through which he planned to acquire the rights to the McDougal story. But American Media decided to call the deal off and hang on to the story, after lawyers raised the concern that such a transaction could be considered a campaign-finance violation. 

It was only after the Wall Street Journal published details of the payoff to McDougal that American Media followed through on having her write a handful of fitness columns.

The checks

But this time, after consulting with Trump, it was agreed that Cohen would pay Daniels himself and that Trump would reimburse him, prosecutors said. According to court filings, Trump allegedly told Cohen to delay paying Daniels for as long as possible — even until after the election, when she might not need to be paid at all.

Cohen then set up another shell company — this one called Essential Consultants LLC — and took $130,000 from his own home-equity line of credit in order to pay Daniels, according to prosecutors. Before actually cutting the check, however, prosecutors said Cohen double-checked with Trump to make sure he would, in fact, reimburse him.

After the election, which Trump won, he instructed Allen Weisselberg, the Trump Organization’s chief financial officer, to pay Cohen $420,000, prosecutors said. The payment was to cover the $130,000 Cohen paid to Daniels; $50,000 for an unrelated service; an additional $180,000 to cover any tax liabilities, allowing Cohen to claim the Daniels hush-money payment as income; plus a $50,000 bonus.

Trump’s alleged criminal liability in the matter stems from agreeing to list in the Trump Organization’s books that the payment to Cohen — broken down into 12 monthly checks of $35,000, each signed by Trump — was for “legal services rendered.” 

Prosecutors say that was false and amounted to a felony. Trump’s lawyers have argued that the charges rest on tenuous legal grounds and that what is alleged is simply sloppy accounting and doesn’t amount to a felony.

The charges against Trump include 12 felony counts of falsifying business records for each check issued and 22 additional felony counts for each time a false reason for issuing a check was entered in the company’s ledger books.

What comes next?

Pecker and Howard, who both reached nonprosecution agreements with federal prosecutors in exchange for their cooperation in the federal investigation, are also expected to testify in the Manhattan district attorney’s case.

Bragg has also signaled that he intends to call on Daniels, whose legal name is Stephanie Clifford, and possibly McDougal to testify in the case. Cohen lawyer Lanny Davis said in a Friday interview with MSNBC that Cohen would be called testify.

While the hush-money case may be the first criminal prosecution Trump will face, it is not expected to be the last.

Trump faces a federal case alleging he incited an insurrection against the U.S. government on Jan. 6, 2021, as part of an effort to overturn the results of the election he had lost to Democrat Joe Biden the previous November. The trial is awaiting a Supreme Court decision on Trump’s claim to immunity for any action he may have taken while in office.

Trump also faces separate state charges in Georgia for allegedly conspiring to illegally overturn the 2020 election result there. 

He also is awaiting trial in federal court in Florida for allegedly keeping boxes of classified documents after leaving office and refusing to return them to the government when asked.

Trump has pleaded not guilty in all cases.