What Longtime Trump Associate David Pecker Doesn’t Want to Discuss on the Witness Stand Involves a Trump-Saudi Plot to Steal the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election
The testimony America is getting from Pecker—and will continue to get from him when he retakes the stand in Trump’s Manhattan criminal trial Thursday—is a pale shadow of the unvarnished truth below.
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Introduction
You may not be able to watch the first criminal trial of a former American president on television, but you can now read the trial transcripts on a daily basis via this link—which reading will inform you of what witnesses are and aren’t being asked, and what jurors in the case therefore are or aren’t being told.
This last question is a particularly pressing one with respect to the first witness in the State of New York’s case-in-chief against Donald Trump, former National Enquirer publisher and longtime Trump business associate David Pecker. It’s not merely that Pecker has evidence the jury must hear that he’s not being asked to provide by state prosecutors, but that the decision by these prosecutors not to ask certain questions of Pecker is providing fodder for those journalists and legal scholars who claim that the entire Manhattan criminal trial of Trump is folly or, worse yet, an embarrassment.
One man taking the latter view is Boston University law professor Jed Shugerman, who the New York Times granted significant column space to recently to expound on his theory that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s case against Trump is not just an “embarrassment” but a “historic mistake.” In making this case, Shugerman relies on one premise above all: that Bragg’s case-in-chief evinces a startling dearth of evidence of the election-related conspiracy its opening statement explicitly promised the jury and, for that matter—though Shugerman omits this fact—rather exhaustively outlined and thus previewed for the jury in that same opening statement.
If Professor Shugerman knew more about the relationship between Mr. Trump and Mr. Pecker, which has sometimes inaptly been described as a friendship but is clearly more like a business association aimed exclusively at the long-term mutual benefit of both parties, the Boston University scholar wouldn’t be rending his garments over the supposed lack of election-related misconduct in Bragg’s case. He’d see it everywhere.
Indeed, while any even mildly lettered schoolboy can do what Shugerman does in the pages of the New York Times—hunt about in the Manhattan indictment for explicit statutory language regarding election crimes—what’s needed at this moment of urgency for American democracy is a rather more robust engagement with not just the facts of the case as recited in the case’s charging documents but the facts of the case as these are known to journalists, including all of the context(s) undergirding the prosecution. There was a time, certainly, when such considerations did matter to the Times.
Yet by exhibiting little to no awareness of the Pecker-Trump relationship outside the four corners of D.A. Bragg’s indictment, Prfoessor Shugerman is at once explaining, without meaning to, (a) why media’s insistence that an election interference case is merely a “hush money” case is in fact a full-throated articulation, day in and day out, of Trump’s benighted defense against 34 felonies—one merely reframed by the Times as though it were neutral reportage and constituting such a solid for Mr. Trump that it warrants a portion of his legal fees being transferred forthwith to the Times offices, and (b) making the case, if again without meaning to, for the prosecution’s case-in-chief to cast its net far wider than it has thus far. (Never mind that the prosecution likely opted not to do this precisely because of years of strident rebukes from media and conservative legal scholars, who from the jump defended Trump by systematically extricating each instance of misconduct from years of essential, inextricable context.)
Shugerman’s recalcitrance matters, for the purposes of this Proof report, because it’s emblematic of how and why the first criminal prosecution of a President of the United States could well go wrong in the coming hours and days. As readers of the New York Times watch Shugerman rake prosecutors across the coals for not presenting evidence of election fraud, they’re also seeing him confidently aver—on no foundation or basis of knowledge whatsoever—that prosecutors can’t help but elide election interference from the so-called “hush money” case because there’s no election interference tied to it. Yet Shugerman is wrong on both counts; though he speaks with the characteristic confidence of every well-educated person who on the issue at bar is an ignoramus, not only does Bragg have plentiful evidence of election interference to offer but far more of it to offer than he ultimately will. So when Shugerman opines that “None of the relevant state or federal statutes [under which Mr. Trump is charged] refer to filing violations as fraud. Calling [Trump’s actions] “election fraud” is a legal and strategic mistake, exaggerating the case and setting up the jury with high expectations that the prosecutors cannot meet…the most accurate description of this criminal case is a federal campaign finance filing violation”, he’s passing on the view the New York Times has explicitly already taken and the one most Americans have wrongly adopted.
In fact, the government witness who’s on the stand right now, and who will return to the stand on Thursday morning, David Pecker, is better positioned than any man on Earth besides Michael Cohen (who’ll either testify next or soon after) to substantiate the notion that, from the very beginning of Pecker’s clandestine involvement(s) in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, his role was to defraud voters systematically and do so as part of an explicit agreement with Trump and his campaign that cast propriety (Trump’s or anyone else’s) to the wind because the stakes in play were simply far too high—and the men involved in the scheme far too unscrupulous—for them to matter: elevation of a corrupt politician and career criminal to the presidency of the United States. And the true scope of that fraud, which was commensurate with the audacity of its endgame, is what the jury in Manhattan is unlikely to hear from either the State of New York or the defendant’s legal team but which Proof will unfold right here.
Preface: Some Essential Background
My summary of Professor Shugerman’s widely read analysis of the Manhattan case did deliberately sidestep one important component of it: the noted legal scholar’s almost melodramatically obtuse evasion of the reason that this case became a state criminal prosecution in the first place. The reason, of course, is that the federal government, under then-president Donald Trump, not only refused to pursue it but delayed its final determination on the question as long as it could in effort to make a state prosecution impossible. It then, incredibly—perhaps even more incredible because it continued into the Biden administration—withheld from state prosecutors for over a year tens of thousands of critical documents the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office needed to have (and needed to turn over to Trump’s lawyers) in order proceed to trial. So it would in fact be accurate to say that the ideal manner of prosecution in the present instance, a federal prosecution, was made impossible by the very corruption of the Trump presidential campaign and Trump administration that this case is ultimately tasked with revealing.
All the foregoing rhetorical morass culminates in Shugerman achieving a seemingly impossible trifecta: (i) blaming the Biden administration (2021–present) rather than the Trump administration (2017–2021) for failing to prosecute a crime committed in 2016, while simultaneously (ii) lauding the Biden administration for giving Trump lenient treatment that it wouldn’t have afforded any other citizen and (iii) using that lenient treatment as evidence that there’s no real case against Trump to begin with.
As Shugerman writes,
Another reason a federal crime has wound up in state court is that President Biden’s Justice Department bent over backward not to reopen this valid case or appoint a special counsel.
Mr. Trump has tried to blame Mr. Biden for this prosecution as the real “election interference.” The Biden administration’s extra restraint belies this allegation and deserves more credit.
Eight years after the alleged crime itself, it is reasonable to ask if this is more about Manhattan politics than New York law. This case should serve as a cautionary tale about broader prosecutorial abuses in America—and promote bipartisan reforms of our partisan prosecutorial system.
Putting aside that, as Professor Shugerman well knows, the very basis of America’s criminal justice system it is inheritance from English common law of an adversarial rather than inquisitional structure—meaning that the parties in any case will always be, and are always anticipated to be, zealous partisans for their own perspective—the truth is that the reason former Trump Attorney General William Barr, the man who ensured this case would be tried at the state level rather than the federal level, now calls the case “political” and an “abomination” and a “real threat” to democracy is because it stands a chance, albeit a remote one, of exposing to the gaze of the U.S. news-reading public exactly how Barr’s Republican Party got a man like Trump into the White House in the first place.
As my New York Times-bestselling book on Trump’s foreign policy, Proof of Conspiracy (Macmillan, 2019) detailed rather exhaustively—a discussion that was continued in its bestselling Macmillan followup, 2020’s Proof of Corruption—it was often then-Attorney General Barr who was tasked with obscuring from public view Trump’s attempts to do favors for (and receive favors from) foreign leaders for reasons having nothing to do with rule of law or American national security but Trump’s own self-interest. This supposed “hush money” case is in fact of precisely that character: it finds Trump (a) dealing illegally with foreign powers for his own personal profit, and (b) requires men of modest scruples like Mr. Barr (or unacknowledged ignorance, like Mr. Shugerman) to vigorously recast it as something else in order to distract us from the actual stakes.
Put even more simply, there are people in media and the law—Shugerman is one—who would likely rather that Donald Trump were not before a jury at a criminal trial at all, not because they’re partisans or because there’s no historical precedent present to guide us under these circumstances but because putting a politician with a national profile on trial requires discussing in earnest normally fanciful conceptualizations like “an election conspiracy.”
Most lawyers, I can say from experience, are uncomfortable with change and anything that sounds superficially like hogwash. Claims of election fraud strike many as instant hogwash not because they’re improbable when a politician of loose morals like Trump is involved—indeed, they may be inevitable—but simply because they’re very rare. But make no mistake: Donald Trump’s Manhattan trial is an election fraud case exclusively because it involves an election-related conspiracy, not because Attorney Bragg or anyone else woke up one morning hoping to irritate and unsettle the entire legal profession by building a criminal prosecution out of acts that otherwise would be associated with Hollywood. Shugerman’s discomfort with this case—though he’d likely never admit it, maybe not even to himself—is, I say with some confidence as a fellow attorney, partly a product of it being truly novel and partly a product of its inescapable sensationalism.
Chapter 1: David Pecker
In his testimony of April 23, 2024, David Pecker confirmed that he was specifically tasked by Donald Trump with working with not just one member of Trump’s inner circle but two: Michael Cohen and Steve Bannon. Given that the latter was Trump’s 2016 campaign CEO as well as one of the Trump candidate’s top campaign advisers, the addition of Bannon to Pecker’s narrative is significant. It ties Pecker specifically to the Trump campaign rather than merely the Trump Organization, the latter of which could easily be cast by Trump’s counsel as a privately held family company with no innate (as opposed to indirect and/or intermittent) political component behind it.
But the involvement of David Pecker with Steve Bannon is significant for another, far more significant reason.
In 2016 in particular, particularly in the latter half of that year, Bannon was central to Trump’s secondhand but in some cases direct outreach to the six foreign leaders—Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt, Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Zayed of the United Arab Emirates, Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, Vladimir Putin of Russia, and Hamad bin Isa bin Salman Al Khalifa of Bahrain—who’d begun to conspire to assist Trump in winning the 2016 presidential election in October 2015.