The remarkable blogpost from Jeff Bezos – Amazon CEO, world’s richest man and owner of the Washington Post – accusing the National Enquirer’s parent company of blackmail adds another bizarre strand to the tangled web tying together Donald Trump, the media and the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Bezos has long been a hate figure for Trump because of his ownership of the Washington Post. Although Bezos does not take an active role in the paper’s management, Trump has repeatedly tweeted about the “Amazon Washington Post”.
Trump has a long relationship with the National Enquirer and its CEO, David Pecker. The company long engaged in “catch-and-kill” agreements on behalf of Trump, paying for negative stories in order not to run them. It admitted to criminal behavior in a plea deal with federal prosecutors where the company and its executives received immunity in exchange for giving evidence against Trump’s fixer Michael Cohen.
These issues collided last month when the National Enquirer ran a story about Bezos’s extramarital affair that relied on intimate text messages between Bezos and Lauren Sanchez, a former TV anchor. At the time of the story, Trump tweeted: “So sorry to hear the news about Jeff Bozo being taken down by a competitor whose reporting, I understand, is far more accurate than the reporting in his lobbyist newspaper, the Amazon Washington Post. Hopefully the paper will soon be placed in better & more responsible hands!”
In his blogpost on Thursday, Bezos suggests the Washington Post’s reporting on the murder of its columnist Jamal Khashoggi may have made him a target of Pecker, pointing out that the National Enquirer’s owner, American Media Inc (AMI), produced a glossy pro-Saudi tabloid.
“It’s unavoidable that certain powerful people who experience Washington Post news coverage will wrongly conclude I am their enemy,” writes Bezos. “President Trump is one of those people, obvious by his many tweets. Also, The Post’s essential and unrelenting coverage of the murder of its columnist Jamal Khashoggi is undoubtedly unpopular in certain circles.”
Bezos even noted that not only was Pecker “apoplectic” about his investigation into how the National Enquirer obtained his text messages but “for reasons still to be better understood, the Saudi angle seems to hit a particularly sensitive nerve”.
There is no way to predict what consequences may stem from the tabloid’s threat to publish a picture of Bezos’s genitalia. But the National Enquirer may be at additional legal risk. In its plea deal with federal prosecutors, AMI pledged not to “commit any crimes subsequent to the date of the signing of this agreement”. The penalty for violation would be to void the immunity agreement and open the company up for prosecution.
AMI has already pledged to “throughly investigate” Bezos’s allegations but the tabloid, which previously paid to cover up Trump’s affairs with adult film star Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen MacDougal, has now even further inserted itself into the muck and mire of scandal surrounding the president and his administration.
