The stunning new Donald Trump scandal that everybody missed yesterday

| 6:41 pm EST February 17, 2018
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Yesterday, Special Counsel Robert Mueller silently dropped a house on Donald Trump, and then Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein sauntered in and called a press conference so everyone could watch him set that house on fire. Mueller and Rosenstein indicted thirteen Russians for having conspired to rig the election in Trump’s favor. It was such a historically stunning development that it wiped all of the other Trump scandal news off the map, meaning that one of Trump’s craziest scandals yet was barely reported at all.

For the past couple weeks we’ve been dealing with the fallout from Donald Trump’s affair with adult film actress Stormy Daniels, and the payoff he made during the election to keep her quiet. Yesterday we learned that Trump also had an affair with Playboy playmate Karen McDougal, and then he essentially had the National Enquirer trick McDougal into paid silence.

Trump’s friend David Pecker, who runs the National Enquirer, bought the exclusive rights to publish McDougal’s story about the affair. What McDougal didn’t know was that the Enquirer was buying the story with the intention of never publishing it, so she could never sell it to anyone else, meaning the affair would never come out. Except oops, thanks to the New Yorker (link), now it has. This story doesn’t matter in the way that the indicted Russians story matters, but it does matter.

It’s not just that Donald Trump had yet another affair. This now establishes that Trump and his allies have a habit of buying the silence of his mistresses. This wasn’t a one-time thing with Daniels. It was part of a pattern. It involves money funneling through the corporation that owns the National Enquirer. And it’s probably far from the only time in which that corporation pulled this kind of thing for Trump. Why did it lay out the money? What did Trump do in return? Where did the money come from? In addition to being salacious, this is turning into a huge financial criminal scandal for Trump, involving a whole lot of people.