Citing the well-known rule of primacy and recency — meaning a jury, and most everyone else, remembers best the first thing and the last thing they hear on a subject — former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance concludes that the first and last witnesses called by the prosecution against Donald Trump in Manhattan are expected to be the most potent.
It’s expected that former AMI Media chief David Pecker will be first witness, which “suggests his cooperation is full and complete,” as Vance assesses the situation. When Pecker ran the National Enquirer, he was a Trump associate who allegedly worked to “catch and kill” negative stories about the then candidate for President. The “catch” was the paying for the exclusive rights to a story; the “kill” was never running them once purchased.
Pecker, if he tells all, has a lot to tell, having been in Trump’s orbit for decades. The relationship is said to have become frayed long before Pecker’s cooperation with the prosecution, so much so that in her book Strongmen: Mussolini to Present, author Ruth Ben-Ghiat reported that speaking about Pecker, Trump once said suggestively to his then attorney Michael Cohen: “Maybe he gets hit by a truck.”
“Maybe he gets hit by a truck,” Trump said to Michael Cohen on a 2018 phone call about David Pecker, then publisher of the National Enquirer, who was considering ending his longtime arrangement with Trump to keep accusations of the President’s sex crimes out of the press.” –from… https://t.co/xvSRqUjkAg
— Ruth Ben-Ghiat (@ruthbenghiat) April 21, 2024
Pecker has apparently been looking both ways before crossing the street, as he is slated to appear — unhit — in court this week. And it’s notable that Trump is famous for vitriolic threatening rhetoric, which his supporters say is supposed to be taken “seriously but not literally.”
In the recording of the conversation (below), it isn’t clear that the “hit by a car” quote is menacing or threatening — it could be seen as a suggestion that, were some accident to strike Pecker, there should be another avenue to get done what they are discussing. Trump’s “hit by a truck” quote could mean, in other words, let’s not put all our eggs in the Pecker basket.
When Cohen says he’ll set up the financing for the deal, Trump asks “What financing?” and suggests “we’ll pay with cash.” Cohen, saying no multiple times, seems to squash the cash idea.
CNN obtained the tape of the Cohen-Trump conversation about Karen McDougal. Here the first part of it, which was just played live on @ChrisCuomo‘s show. pic.twitter.com/5N4X6Ew8GC
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 25, 2018