Donald Trump allegedly had a love child with his housekeeper, and the coverup is under criminal investigation
Donald Trump’s affairs, and his attempts at covering them up, are once again causing legal trouble for him and his allies. This time around the story involves not just an alleged affair, but also an alleged love child, along with a doorman who ratted him out for it, a tabloid paper spending big money to make sure the story never ran, and a raid on the office of Trump’s attorney in an attempt at sorting it all out.
The story is this: Trump’s former doorman sold his story about the alleged Trump love child to the National Enquirer. Considering their record, if they had turned around and run the story, we would consider it to be as illegitimate as anything else they print. But instead they did the opposite. They bought the exclusive rights to the story for the express purpose of not publishing it, and making sure no one else ever published it either, unbeknownst to the doorman. So how did this become a potentially criminal matter?
Donald Trump is close friends with National Enquirer owner David Pecker, which explains why Pecker’s tabloid rag sought to acquire and kill the story. This comes after the National Enquirer took similar measures to acquire and kill the story of Trump’s mistress Karen McDougal. The big question is whether Pecker is merely such a big Trump fan that he was willing to throw around large sums of money to protect him, or if Trump was reimbursing him for it. As the New York Daily News is explaining, if Trump sent money or other compensation of value back to Pecker, it would have been handled by Cohen, and that evidence would have been seized in this week’s raid.
This leaves a few legal questions. If Michael Cohen did pay off the National Enquirer to bury this and other negative stories during the election, that can be seen as a violation of federal election laws. If Donald Trump knew about it, he’d be on the hook for the same crime. There’s also the matter of the alleged love child. These developments do not prove that the child exists, but it’s noteworthy that Trump and/or his allies specifically wanted to prevent this story from seeing the light of day. The love child will get the headlines, but the coverup is the criminal matter here.
