Marc Lasry sits beside former President Bill Clinton, during the first half of an NBA basketball game between the Milwaukee Bucks and the Brooklyn Nets on Nov. 2, 2015, in New York. According to a memo released by WikiLeaks, Lasry was helpful in “killing potential unfavorable stories in the Enquirer” of the Clintons. | AP Photo Clinton donor allegedly killed National Enquirer stories A memo from the WikiLeaks trove claims Marc Lasry used his financial ties to the tabloid to help kill Clinton stories.

A top donor who had a major stake in the National Enquirer helped avert damaging stories about the Clintons in the tabloid, according to a 2011 memo released Sunday by WikiLeaks.

The donor, hedge fund billionaire Marc Lasry, “has been helpful on a number of fronts,” according to the memo, which was written by longtime Clinton aide Doug Band in Nov. 2011, including “killing potential unfavorable stories in the Enquirer.”


At the time the memo was written, Lasry’s hedge fund, Avenue Capital Group, owned some of the $513 million in debt accrued by the Enquirer’s publisher, American Media, Inc., and Band’s memo asserts Avenue “owns a controlling share of the debt.”

Neither Band nor Lasry responded to requests for comment on Sunday, but representatives for Lasry’s firm and the National Enquirer denied the claim in the memo.

“Nobody influences the editorial decision-making process at the National Enquirer other than its editors,” said a representative for the tabloid.

A spokesman for Avenue Capital Group, Todd Fogarty of the public relations firm Kekst, said Band’s memo “contains a number of inaccuracies,” including the claim that Lasry sought to influence the National Enquirer’s coverage on behalf of the Clintons. Fogarty called it “ridiculous to say that Marc or Avenue influenced the editorial direction of the National Enquirer in any way.”

Avenue Capital hasn’t had a stake in American Media since August 2014.

Clinton’s team has refused to publicly confirm the authenticity of WikiLeaks’ trove of emails stolen from the private account of campaign chairman John Podesta, and has accused Russian entities of being behind the hack.

Other favors done by Lasry for the Clintons, according to Band’s memo, include raising and donating huge sums of cash for the Clinton Foundation, lending his plane to the family and employing Chelsea Clinton at Avenue Capital.

Band for years worked closely with Bill Clinton on the former president’s business ventures and on the Clinton Foundation’s Clinton Global Initiative, and he also worked as a paid advisor to Avenue Capital.

In the memo, he takes credit for introducing the Clintons to Lasry and for helping Chelsea Clinton land a job at Lasry’s hedge fund as a chemical industry analyst.

At the time of the memo, though, Band was engaged in a turf war at the Clinton Foundation with Chelsea Clinton, who had flagged as potential conflicts of interest Band’s paid consulting work outside the Clinton Foundation.

In a previously unpublished portion of the memo, Band cited Lasry’s overlapping involvement with the Clintons’ foundation and the family’s personal finances to highlight the difficulty in disentangling the various phases of what Band derisively called “Bill Clinton, Inc.”

“Mr. Lasry is a good example of the complex relationships a friend/supporter can have within the Foundation,” Band wrote in the memo, crediting Lasry with personally donating $142,500 to the Clinton Foundation and committing $2 million more, while raising “several hundred thousand dollars” from others in “two Foundation fundraisers at his home.”

Band also indicates that Lasry helped Marc Mezvinsky – Chelsea Clinton’s husband — in raising money for Mezvinksy’s hedge fund.

But the claim about Lasry’s intervention at the National Enquirer stands out in light of recent developments in the presidential race.

On Friday, the Wall Street Journal reported that the National Enquirer paid $150,000 to a former Playboy playmate for exclusive rights to her story about having an affair with Donald Trump, but it never published the story.

Karen McDougal, Playboy's 1998 playmate of the year, claims to have had an affair with Trump from 2006 to 2007, while he was married to his current wife, Melania Trump, according to the report. American Media Inc. confirmed the payment, but said it was for a column.