Court Appearances: Andrew Rice

The Gossip Racketeers At the heart of the Trump trial is a sleazy caper gone wrong.

Both sides in Donald Trump’s trial say that the case, which technically concerns the crime of falsifying business records, is truly about politics. The prosecution said in its opening argument that Trump had “orchestrated a criminal scheme to corrupt the 2016 presidential election.” The following week, Trump’s attorney Todd Blanche said he and his client “very much believe that this is a political persecution, that it’s a political trial.” While that message may resonate with Trump’s audience outside the courtroom, the jury has been hearing a very different kind of story over the past two weeks. The trial narrative is less about any election than it is about secrets—a crime of gossip.

The first two major witnesses, David Pecker, the former chief executive of American Media, Inc., which owns the National Enquirer, and Keith Davidson, a Hollywood lawyer who makes his living from scandals, have offered the jurors a tutorial in the way professionals obtain secrets, assess their value, and put them to use. It’s a trade that powerful men have long used to protect themselves and undermine one another. Pecker testified that in 2015, he went to Trump Tower to meet with the candidate, an old friend and Enquirer staple, and proposed to act as Trump’s “eyes and ears,” watching out for any damaging stories “in the marketplace.” Davidson picked up the narrative in June 2016, when, by his own telling, the caper began with a late-night text message.

“I have a blockbuster trump story,” he wrote to Dylan Howard, the chief content officer of American Media, who edited the Enquirer.