AFP | American Media Chairman and CEO David Pecker (left) and New York Post columnist Keith Kelly (right) pose for a photo with playboy bunny Hiromi Oshima at the Playboy's 50th anniversary party in New York City on June 10, 2010.

Confidants of President Donald Trump have been falling to the justice system like dominos of late, and among those who have been caught up in the Mueller probe is media executive David Pecker. Who is he and why is he part of the investigation?

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David J. Pecker is the 67-year-old chairman and CEO of American Media, the nation’s largest tabloid news publisher whose titles include, among others, the National Enquirer. The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that federal prosecutors have granted Pecker immunity amid an investigation into hush money payments made shortly before the 2016 election to two women claiming to have had affairs with Trump.

Pecker is a longtime friend and protector of Trump, and the two have a lot in common. He, like Trump, was raised in an outer borough of New York City – Pecker in the Bronx and Trump in Queens – has a second house in Palm Beach and is obsessed with celebrity.

But unlike Trump, who got a leg up from his father in the form of an Ivy League education and millions of dollars in loans to build his business, Pecker fuelled his own meteoric rise. He attended Pace University in New York and worked as an accountant at Price Waterhouse before jumping to CBS Magazines and rising through the ranks there to become vice president and controller. When CBS Magazines was acquired by Hachette, he quickly worked his way up to CEO of that company. While there, he oversaw the creation of Trump Style magazine.

From Hachette, Pecker moved to American Media, Inc. (AMI) and the relationship between the two men continued to grow. Pecker was a frequent visitor to Trump’s Palm Beach mansion Mar-a-Lago, and the Enquirer gave Trump glowing coverage.

“Pecker would take care of Trump,” former National Enquirer executive Stu Zakim told CNN. “You have to understand the basis of the relationship that the two guys have.”

On several occasions, Pecker used his position at American Media to protect Trump, buying the rights to stories that could be damaging for his friend and then making sure they never saw the light of day, a tactic referred to as “catch and kill”. While the practice raises questions of journalistic ethics, it isn’t illegal – as long as Trump was just a businessman or a television celebrity.

Once he became a candidate for federal office, though, the game changed. At issue are payments American Media made to two women during the 2016 campaign. Playboy Playmate Karen McDougal, who said she had an affair with Trump in 2006 and 2007, reached a deal to be paid $150,000 for her story and porn star Stormy Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, negotiated a $130,000 payment through Trump legal fixer Michael Cohen. Both stories were buried until after the campaign.

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Cohen has since pleaded guilty to bank fraud and campaign violations linked to the payments. In court on Tuesday, he said he had agreed to work with Pecker to make the deals "in coordination with, and at the direction of, a candidate for federal office". That candidate is clearly Trump.

Court documents connected with Cohen’s plea say that during the run-up to the election Pecker "offered to help deal with negative stories about [Trump's] relationships with women by, among other things, assisting the campaign in identifying such stories so they could be purchased and their publication avoided", the court papers say.

Campaign finance laws prohibit corporations from spending money or cooperating with a campaign to influence an election, although media organizations are generally exempted as long as they are performing a journalistic function. The question for American Media, though, is whether paying hush money qualifies as journalism. Campaign finance expert Richard Hasen told the Associated Press that prosecutors don’t appear to think it does.

"AMI and Pecker have not been charged, but they might be charged," he said. Though a novel legal case might be made that paying sources for silence is in fact standard tabloid reporting practice, he said, Cohen's plea agreement doesn't give that theory much weight.

Instead, the charges indicate that prosecutors see the hush payments as illegal campaign contributions.

Their efforts to help Trump – the National Enquirer gave him its first-ever presidential endorsement in 2016 and published a series of unflattering articles about his Republican primary opponents and Hillary Clinton – are far from American Media’s first foray into politics. The tabloid became an indisputable player on the political stage in the late 1980s, when it scuttled the presidential bid of Gary Hart by publishing a cover photo of him with model and campaign aide Donna Rice on his lap. It dashed the White House aspirations of John Edwards a decade later with the disclosure that he had had an extramarital affair.

In those cases, though, the tabloid’s reports remained grounded in scandal. Its coverage of Trump veered into advocacy territory – so much so that the New Yorker magazine said the Enquirer had embraced the candidate “with sycophantic fervor”.

That adoration, though, seems to have faded for Pecker once he was facing the prospect of jail time. According to the reports Thursday about his immunity deal, he has told investigators that Trump knew about the payoffs to his accusers, prompting legal analysts to describe the president as an "unindicted co-conspirator" in a federal crime.

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