Trump

Guardian - We’ve now finished our first week of testimony in former president Donald Trump’s criminal trial – and have one major witness in the books. David Pecker, the former CEO of American Media Inc, and CEO and publisher of the National Enquirer, wrapped up his testimony on Friday afternoon after cross-examination by Trump’s legal team and a quick second round of questioning from the prosecution and defense.

Prosecutors had a few main goals with Pecker:

• Show that Pecker and Trump engaged in an illegal conspiracy to influence the 2016 election
• Establish AMI’s “catch-and-kill” pattern of purchasing negative stories about Trump to keep them under wraps
• Show how close the former Trump attorney Michael Cohen was with Trump
• Tee things up for future testimony about the falsified payments scheme that Trump allegedly used to pay back Cohen after he paid to keep adult film star Stormy Daniels from telling the public about her alleged affair with Trump before the 2016 election

They seemed to achieve all of them, to varying degrees. Pecker said he had agreed to help Trump keep bad stories out of the news, saying on multiple occasions that he had promised to be the Trump campaign’s “eyes and ears” for problematic stories – a contention he repeated while being grilled by Trump’s attorney on Friday. He said explicitly, and repeatedly, that he had been doing so to help Trump’s election chances. When asked why he’d paid $150,000 to buy the former Playboy model Karen McDougal’s story to keep it quiet, he said he and Cohen “didn’t want this story to embarrass Mr Trump or embarrass or hurt the campaign”. He talked about specific meetings he had had with both Cohen and Trump, and made clear that Cohen had regularly checked in with him on behalf of “the boss”. And Pecker’s testimony established a pattern of Trump looking to get others to buy women’s silence to help his campaign, setting up Trump’s post-election payments to Cohen.

BBC - One of Donald Trump's potential running mates is facing criticism for sharing a story in her memoir about how she killed her dog. Kristi Noem, 52, the governor of South Dakota, wrote in her soon-to-be released memoir that the dog, Cricket, was "untrainable" and "dangerous."After deciding she needed to be put down, Ms Noem led the dog to a gravel pit and shot her."It was not a pleasant job," she wrote. "But it had to be done."