Ronan Farrow: National Enquirer shredded secret Trump documents
(Politico) American Media, Inc. and the National Enquirer shredded sensitive Donald Trump-related documents that had been held in a top-secret safe right before Trump was elected in 2016, according to fresh allegations made in a new book by journalist Ronan Farrow.
During the first week of November 2016, the book alleges that Dylan Howard, who was then editor in chief of the National Enquirer, ordered a staff member to “get everything out of the safe” and that “we need to get a shredder down there.” His order came the same day a reporter for the Wall Street Journal had called the Enquirer to ask for comment on a story about how AMI, which owns the supermarket tabloid, had paid $150,000 to former Playboy model Karen McDougal who said she had had an affair with Trump to keep her quiet right before the election. The Enquirer never published her story.
“The staffer opened the safe, removed a set of documents, and tried to wrest it shut,” Farrow writes. “Later, reporters would discuss the safe like it was the warehouse where they stored the Ark of the Covenant in Indiana Jones, but it was small and cheap and old.” The safe, which often got jammed, had sat for years in an office that belonged to the Enquirer’s then-longtime executive editor, Barry Levine. Farrow also quotes an Enquirer employee as saying that later that day a trash disposal crew collected “a larger than customary volume of refuse.”
That June, according to Farrow, Howard had put together a full list of Trump-related “dirt” that was in AMI’s archives, some dating back decades. After Trump was elected, Trump fixer Michael Cohen asked for all of AMI’s materials about Trump. “There was an internal debate: some were starting to realize that surrendering it all would create a legally problematic paper trail, and resisted,” Farrow writes in “Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators” which will be published on Tuesday.
read more: https://www.politico.com/news/2019/10/14/ronan-farrow-national-enquirer-shredded-trump-documents-046711
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