Ex-insider spills dirt on how The National Enquirer protected Trump

A former employee at The National Enquirer, Lachlan Cartwright, is opening up in a piece in The New York Times about what he saw of their "catch and kill" operation for Trump while he worked there.

The company was at the heart of Trump's operation to shut down negative stories about himself during the 2016 election. Another aspect of that scheme, the hush payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels, has since gotten Trump into legal trouble as prosecutors allege that he falsified business records to conceal the nature of the payments.

"For me, reading the indictment was like stepping through the looking glass, because it described a three-year period in my own professional life, one that I have come to deeply regret," wrote Cartwright. "Dino the Doorman? During my time at American Media Inc. (A.M.I.), The Enquirer’s parent company, I was one of the editors pushing our reporters to confirm that story. McDougal’s fitness columns were published only after I instructed a colleague to work with the model to put them together. These were all pretty normal things to do during my time there, a life-changing detour in my career, which happened to coincide with a bizarre period at A.M.I., when it was allegedly enlisted — in some ways that I saw and in others that I didn’t — into the service of helping Trump become president. Now, as a former president faces a criminal trial for the first time in American history, I’m forced to grapple with what really happened at The Enquirer in those years — and whether and how I can ever set things right."

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The catch and kill model wasn't limited to Trump, Cartwright explained — they had similar arrangements with Harvey Weinstein, the film producer who would later go to prison for a horrific pattern of sexual abuse. Cartwright's superior at the Enquirer, Dylan Howard, reportedly had a close relationship with Weinstein.

And meanwhile, the Enquirer was working the other side, spinning up bogus stories about Hillary Clinton as she ran against Trump, like "HILLARY: 6 MONTHS TO LIVE!"

"These covers came with doctored images of Clinton looking frail, bolstered by quotes from anyone who would say the right things and had a title that tenuously qualified him to offer an opinion," wrote Cartwright. "The Enquirer did employ real reporters who would comb through documents, cultivate sources and use old-school reporting techniques, but I was coming to terms with the other side of the magazine, where a headline was chosen and editors and writers spun up a tenuous story to match."

Trump's other rivals, like Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), also got targeted in this way, he said.

Ultimately, Cartwright wrote, on the Friday before the 2016 election, he blew the whistle on the McDougall story getting bought and buried when a Wall Street Journal reporter came calling, and the rest was history.

"After Trump won, I could not hide my utter contempt for Howard," wrote Cartwright. "My position as his deputy became untenable. By this point, the two of us were barely on speaking terms. I wasted my afternoons drinking alone in nearby bars and restaurants while I devised an exit strategy. I retained an employment attorney, knowing that both Howard and Pecker would love nothing more than to screw me on the way out. Howard was enraged by my behavior and made it known to others in the newsroom." He was ultimately given nine months of half-wages and work as severance to prevent him from violating his work visa to stay in the country.

And finally last year, wrote Cartwright, "the Bragg indictment outlined, in plain and unafraid black and white, the schemes that felt so opaque and contentious and complex when I had to navigate my way through them in real time. But it was the 13-page statement of facts that brought me to tears. On Page 3, prosecutors outlined 'The Catch and Kill Scheme to Suppress Negative Information,' and it revealed to me that I had been managing a newsroom with improvised explosive devices planted everywhere. The secret deal that was made at Trump Tower, where Pecker told Cohen he would act as the campaign’s 'eyes and ears.' The hush-money payoffs. The plot to publish negative stories about Trump’s rivals. A scheme to influence the 2016 election."