Besides detailing the tabloid’s involvement in payoffs to porn star Stormy Daniels and Playboy Playmate Karen McDougal to keep quiet about alleged affairs with Trump, court papers showed how David Pecker, a longtime friend of the president and head of Enquirer parent company American Media Inc., offered to help Trump stave off negative stories during the 2016 campaign.
Court papers say that Pecker “offered to help deal with negative stories about (Trump’s) relationships with women by, among other things, assisting the campaign in identifying such stories so they could be purchased and their publication avoided.”

The accusations threaten Pecker’s company, American Media Inc., both legally and in the court of public opinion.The relationship between Trump and the Enquirer has been cozy for decades.

In 2010, at Cohen’s urging, the National Enquirer began promoting a potential Trump presidential candidacy, referring readers to a pro-Trump website Cohen helped create. With Cohen’s involvement, the publication began questioning President Barack Obama’s birthplace and American citizenship in print, an effort that Trump promoted for several years, former staffers said.

The Enquirer endorsed Trump for president in 2016, the first time it had ever officially backed a candidate. In the news pages, Trump’s coverage was so favorable that the New Yorker magazine said the Enquirer embraced him “with sycophantic fervor.”

Positive headlines for Trump were matched by negative stories about his opponents: an Enquirer front page from 2015 said “Hillary: 6 Months to Live” and accompanied the headline with a picture of an unsmiling Clinton with bags under her eyes.

Campaign finance laws generally prohibit corporations from cooperating with a campaign to affect an election, though media organizations are exempted from that restriction so long as they’re performing a journalistic function. AMI’s problem, said campaign finance expert Richard Hasen, is that Cohen’s prosecutors don’t appear to think hush money payments qualify as journalism.
When negotiations lagged on the Clifford deal shortly before the election, her lawyer told the Enquirer that she was close to reaching a deal with another outlet to tell her story. An editor at the tabloid, in turn, texted Cohen to say something needed to be done “or it could look awfully bad for everyone,” according to court papers.

The deal was quickly reached, and Cohen agreed to make the payment. The accusations raise the question — can the Enquirer, indeed all of American Media, really be considered a media company when people become more familiar with its political activities?

Through an aggressive acquisition strategy, AMI has lately cornered a large part of the celebrity publication market. Besides tabloids like the Enquirer, Star and Globe, it also owns Us Weekly, In Touch and Life & Style.
 Despite a reputation for fanciful stories, the Enquirer has a history of some aggressive political reporting; the tabloid’s stories on John Edwards and Gary Hart helped end the chances of both men becoming president.