F.O.P.: Jared Kushner's Pecker Pickle

Remember, the former president's son-in-law was once the liaison between AMI and Trumpland

The Manhattan criminal trial of Donald Trump is like one of those lame TV show reunion specials—like when the cast of Friends gets back together, only for traitors. Everyone is visibly older. Everyone’s career is on the decline. But it’s the same colorful cast of characters—the MAGA Monica, Rachel, Chandler, Joey, Phoebe, and Ross.

There’s Trump, first and foremost—heavier, stinkier, and sleepier than the 2016 edition, but still with the same cotton-candy hair, the same blue suit, the same red tie, the same glower. There’s the former Stephanie Gregory Clifford, better known by her adult-film stage name, Stormy Daniels. There’s the ex-Playboy model, Karen McDougal. There’s David Pecker, once the publisher of the National Enquirer, with his tie-the-damsel-to-the-train-tracks mustache and cloying grin. There’s Michael Cohen, Trump’s attack-dog personal attorney cum cooperating convicted felon cum podcast star. Even Michael Avenatti, Stormy’s disgraced former lawyer, has emerged from the bowels of whatever penitentiary he’s doing time in to share his thoughts on the proceedings.

But one cast member—a supporting player, to be sure, but definitely a key part of the show; Charlie, perhaps, to this bevy of fallen Angels—has skipped the reunion. How come? Well, he certainly doesn’t need the money; his subsequent deal with the Saudis—more on them later— has set him up for life. And he could do without the increased notoriety; the last thing he wants is his name in the papers associated with this motley crew. Furthermore, he joined the ensemble late, after a lot of the seminal events had already taken place—like Joshua Molina on The West Wing,

If Jared Kushner did not break any laws with regard to the Trump catch-and-kill imbroglio—and let me be clear, he did not—neither was he entirely blameless. The criminal defendant’s son-in-law was, reportedly, intimately involved with the National Enquirer’s…I badly want to write “collusion,” because that’s what it was, but that’s not the correct legal term…let us say its special relationship with Donald. Indeed, according to The Daily Beast, Kushner was his father-in-law’s AMI liaison, his ambassador to Sleazeland. Jared was all in with Pecker.

Back in December 2018, not long after the Kavanaugh confirmation and the midterms, The Daily Beast’s Asawin Suebsaeng, Maxwell Tani, and Lloyd Grove published an exclusive with this no-bones-about-it headline: “Jared Kushner Replaced Michael Cohen as Trump’s National Enquirer Connection.” It begins:

Shortly after the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner was handed a task considered critical to the president’s operations. In addition to serving as a senior adviser in the White House, he would also be playing the role of the main conduit between Trump and his friend David Pecker, the National Enquirer publisher and chief executive of AMI, who prosecutors said on Wednesday admitted to making a $150,000 hush-money payment “in concert with” the Trump campaign.

“Wednesday” was December 12, 2018. Now, almost five and a half years later, Pecker is finally back in court, testifying against Trump, for whose campaign hush money was paid “in concert with.”

But it’s Jared Kushner’s close involvement with Pecker that is the bombshell of the article, which continues:

During the early months of the Trump era, Kushner performed the task admirably, discussing with Pecker various issues over the phone, including everything from international relations to media gossip, according to four sources familiar with the situation. Pecker, for his part, bragged to people that he was speaking to the president’s son-in-law and, more generally, about the level of access he had to the upper echelons of the West Wing, two sources with knowledge of the relationship recounted.

The change happened because Michael Cohen, the previous Pecker intermediary, was pulled off the assignment. He was perceived as too toxic for a West Wing job—which, considering that the incoming Trump administration would hire both Steve Bannon and Mike Flynn, is saying something. Per The Daily Beast, Pecker’s “ties to Trump began well before the president was elected to office. But before Kushner was his main conduit, that role was played by Michael Cohen, the president’s former attorney and fixer.”

It wasn’t just suppressing negative stories about Trump, incidentally, that AMI handled, although that is the matter at the heart of the current criminal trial. Pecker’s organ did a lot of other dirty work for Donald; the Enquirer “endorsed Trump…and published numerous negative articles on Trump’s political enemies and adversaries in the Republican primary. Trump himself used to contribute to the Enquirer and the future president reportedly also used the tabloid to settle his pettier, more personal scores,” the article tells us, referencing an alleged retributory smear of the actress Salma Hayek when she had the audacity to spurn Trump’s romantic advances.

In effect, Donald, through his buddy David Pecker, weaponized a supermarket tabloid—the source of “news” for God knows how many low-information voters—against his political rival, and on his behalf. The National Fucking Enquirer! In the bag for Trump!

Why was Kushner chosen to take over as point person after Cohen’s departure? He and Pecker were already quite chummy, the Daily Beast tells us:

Two people with direct knowledge of their acquaintance say that Kushner and Pecker got to know each other years before Trump’s election, when Pecker was thinking about forging a business relationship with Kushner, who at the time owned The New York Observer. Two other knowledgeable sources say that then Observer Editor in Chief Ken Kurson, a close friend of Kushner’s, had even visited the AMI offices in 2016, and sat in on an editorial meeting.

If the name Ken Kurson rings a bell, it’s because he was the recipient of one of the most egregious of the Trump pardons. I wrote about him last summer:

On January 19, 2021, the last full day of his presidency, Donald John Trump issued a flurry of pardons. Among the beneficiaries was Ken Kurson, a writer, editor, political consultant, and former punk musician.

As pardon material, Kurson was an unusual choice. Typically, individuals who receive pardons distinguish themselves by putting their life of crime behind them, by expressing remorse, by giving back to the community, by visibly changing their lives for the better. These are supposed to be redemption stories. There’s usually some well-placed senator, governor, or House representative lobbying for the pardon. Sometimes they’ve already served a big chunk of their prison term; sometimes they’ve already been out of jail for years.

Kurson was none of those things. He was under indictment for cyberstalking and harassment. The arrest warrant summarizes the nasty, vindictive behavior:

FBI Special Agents obtained information indicating that KURSON had used the mail, interactive computer services, electronic communication services, electronic communication systems of interstate commerce and other facilities of interstate commerce to stalk and harass Individual No. 1, Individual No. 2 and Individual No. 3 (collectively, the “Victims”) between approximately November 2015 and December 2015. . . . [D]uring this time period, KURSON was engaged in divorce proceedings and blamed Individual No. 1, among others, for the dissolution of his marriage. As a result, beginning in or about November 2015, KURSON threatened to ruin Individual No. 1’s reputation and engaged in a pattern of stalking and harassment against Individual No. 1.

(You can read more about the unpleasant details of the case here.)

There was no respected elder statesman sponsoring the push to Free Kurson. His case hadn’t even gone to trial when he scored the pardon, so his victims were denied their day in court. And he was unlikely to get off. The FBI had him dead to rights.

But Kurson had an ace in the hole: he was close friends with Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law. Kushner had hired Kurson to head the New York Observer, the venerable and beloved Gotham periodical he bought and ruined…

Kurson was also tight with Rudy Giuliani, with whom he’d co-authored a book, and whose ill-fated 2008 presidential campaign he worked on. And he’d authored a speech for FPOTUS….

This means that Kurson was 1) in with Trump, the ultimate arbiter of who got a pardon; 2) BFFs with Kushner, the West Winger in charge of “trying to get as many pardons done” as possible before the end of Trump’s term; and 3) close to Giuliani…

This is like John leaning on his friendship with Paul and his close working relationship with Ringo to score a pardon from George. Of course Kurson got his Get Out of Jail Free card, just like Kerik did. Charles Kushner, Jared’s felon old man, got one, too.

When contacted by The Daily Beast for comment, Kurson told them he had indeed met with Dylan Howard, then the AMI senior editor—and a tabloid journalist not unfamiliar with controversy. Rule of thumb: If you’re a member of the media, you don’t want to turn up in a New York Times exposé called “Harvey Weinstein’s Media Complicity Machine.” This is from that article, published in December 2017:

And after two actresses, Ms. [Ashley] Judd and Ms. [Rose] McGowan, made veiled mention of misconduct by Mr. Weinstein in 2015 and 2016, Mr. [Dylan] Howard came to his aid. The Weinstein Company told the editor about Ms. McGowan’s allegations and said “it might be a good article for him to pursue,” according to Ms. Hofmeister, the producer’s spokeswoman. She said that Mr. Howard was never asked to “dig up damaging information on actresses.”

Mr. Howard dispatched a reporter at the entertainment news service Coleman-Rayner, which works with American Media, to collect hostile commentary about Ms. McGowan. “This is killer. Especially if my fingerprints r not on this,” Mr. Weinstein wrote in an email obtained by The Times and first reported in The New Yorker.

The Times also tells us that Weinstein “was so close to David J. Pecker, the chief executive of American Media Inc., which owns The Enquirer, that he was known in the tabloid industry as an untouchable ‘F.O.P.,’ or ‘friend of Pecker.’ That status was shared by a chosen few, including President Trump.”

“Going low” is one thing; “doing dirty work for Harvey Weinstein” is a whole new circle of hell.

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I mention all of this to emphasize just how sleazy the participants here were. Donald Trump, so comfortable in this milieu, happily courted all of them.

And if Trump was a “F.O.P.,” so was his son-in-law.

The Daily Beast reports that Kushner and Pecker talked on the regular, “on subjects ranging from relations with the Saudi regime, to possible dirt that the Enquirer had on Morning Joe’s Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough, according to the four sources who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.”

The two publishers had something else in common: they were cozy with the Kingdom. “AMI, like Kushner, cozied up to the despotic Saudi government, which included the production of a glossy propaganda magazine boosting Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.”

You know, MbS—Jared’s bro who had Jamal Khashoggi killed.

The tactics of acquiring unseemly kompromat on rivals, it should be noted, is well known to Kushner, as this was ultimately one of the reasons his father, Charles Kushner, was sent to prison.

These days, Jared is doing his best, it appears, to distance himself from Trumpland. He eschews suit and tie for a more informal, casual look. He has facial hair and a sun-tan. He seems to legitimately be enjoying his new career as a wealth manager for foreign gazillionaires, and while his entrance into that line of work was predicated totally on nepotism, he does seem to be doing a decent job. His wife’s Instagram feed, as I’ve noted previously, is desperate to present the Kushner family as wholesome, happy, and normal.

But here’s the ugly truth: Once a F.O.P., always a F.O.P.

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Photo credit: DoD. Jared Kushner, Senior Advisor to President Donald J. Trump, speaks with Marine Corps Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Douglas A. Silliman, U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of Iraq, and Lt. Gen. Stephen J. Townsend, commander, Combined Joint Task Force – Operation Inherent Resolve, after arriving in Baghdad, Iraq, April 3, 2017. (DoD Photo by Navy Petty Officer 2nd Class Dominique A. Pineiro)