'A criminal enterprise': Former David Pecker exec blows whistle on covering up for Trump

During an appearance on MSNBC's "The Weekend," the former executive editor of the National Enquirer admitted that during his tenure his boss was running the organization like a 'criminal enterprise" while working hand-in-hand with Donald Trump.

Speaking with the hosts on Sunday morning, Lachlan Cartwright claimed he was not privy to all the details of publisher David Pecker's behind-the-scenes plotting and that he had told friends he thought something seemed amiss as when they ended up burying potentially explosive stories.

After stating he discussed what he was seeing at the time with friends, he explained, "They would say, 'chill out, you could be a conspiracy theorist.' Now I'm hearing it confirmed by David Pecker in court. Now my friends are saying, sorry, you were not a conspiracy theorist."

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"There's one candidate up in the polls, we're running a hit piece and it seemed like it was coordination — I had nothing to go on," he recalled "Then you had the other thing with these catch and kills. We're going through the process with a doorman, paid him $30,000, which is a large amount of money to pay for a story, especially a story we're not even running. Then Karen McDougal, she has an incredible story about an affair with Donald Trump. I thought, 'brilliant, this is the kind of scoop I came here to break - when are we running it?' We're not. David Pecker has bought the story to kill it. I thought, 'what world are we living in?'"

He later added, "I, you know, had a journalism life before American Media Inc. I was at the New York Post, I was at the New York Daily New, papers in London. I came to AMI to break significant, impactful stories, such as what would have been the Karen McDougal story. And instead, we're running these hit pieces where the American Media was turning to a criminal enterprise to protect the rich and powerful, and it became a propaganda machine, and that's not something I signed up for."

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MSNBC 04 28 2024 08 38 28youtu.be