AMI David Pecker: The Blackmail & Extortion of Jeff Bezos

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Re: AMI David Pecker: The Blackmail & Extortion of Jeff Bezo

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Mar 04, 2019 7:06 pm

“We’re F--ked. Gavin Is Going to Get Jeff Back Together with MacKenzie”: Inside the Bezos Affair, a Tale of Love, Lust, Uncertainty, and Way More Complexifiers Than Previously Imagined

“At the end of this, we’re all going to look really, really bad,” says Michael Sanchez.

Gabriel ShermanMarch 3, 2019 7:00 pm
Who is Lauren Sanchez?
Lauren Sanchez in Los Angeles, California in 2015.

From WENN/Alamy.

Improbably, given all that’s happened, they’re still together. There are any number of people or entities who have been accused of trying to tear Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez asunder: Donald Trump, the Saudis, David Pecker, Bezos’s longtime security chief Gavin de Becker, William Morris Endeavor co-C.E.O. Patrick Whitesell, and Sanchez’s brother, Michael, who’s been accused of leaking Bezos’s intimate texts to The National Enquirer. (“I love you, alive girl. I will show you with my body, and my lips and my eyes, very soon,” Bezos wrote.) But, according to some, Bezos and Sanchez are as close as they’ve ever been. “It’s a legendary romance that will blow your mind as to just how in love they are,” Michael told me last month. “It’s real,” said another source close to the couple.

In the days after the Enquirer splashed their affair on its January 10 cover, Bezos and Sanchez stayed apart, as Michael Sanchez says de Becker had advised them to do, but they didn’t split up. They discussed meeting on January 18, when Bezos accepted an aviation award in Beverly Hills, a source close to the couple told me—flying has been central to their romance—but the date didn’t happen. Sanchez went to Cabo in early February. The New York Post’s Page Six reported that she returned for a “secret reunion” around Valentine’s Day at one of Bezos’s Manhattan properties, and they talked about attending the Oscars together, but Bezos ultimately went to the Vanity Fair party by himself (Patrick Whitesell was standing a few feet away). “He was very relaxed,” said someone who talked to him. He seemed as if he didn’t have a care in the world. (Bezos declined to comment. Sanchez didn’t respond to an e-mail seeking comment.)

No matter what else happens, the situation has all the hallmarks of a Trump-era scandal: absurd and darkly lurid and completely overdrawn, with a cast of characters both superpowerful and ridiculous, and with enormous political and journalistic stakes—not to mention the mid-life crisis of the world’s richest man. Bezos has transformed markedly in the last few years, shaving the last wisps of hair from his head, upscaling his wardrobe, and developing impressive biceps. He’s acquired mogul-appropriate toys and hobbies, including owning The Washington Post and space-tourism company Blue Origin. During a February speech in New York, he proclaimed his goal to colonize the solar system with a trillion human beings.

Bezos has always taken pride in his boldness, and the Medium essay he published four weeks after the Enquirer story was in line with some of his business maneuvers, a jujitsu move whereby he flipped his script from unfaithful cad to upholder of the highest values, standing up to a blackmail attempt by a well-known bully at great personal risk. “My ownership of The Washington Post is a complexifier,” Bezos wrote. “It’s unavoidable that certain powerful people who experience Washington Post news coverage will wrongly conclude I am their enemy.” He accused the Enquirer of publishing the article about his affair as a favor to Trump and Saudi Arabia, both of whom despise the Post. Bezos’s evidence was e-mails from A.M.I.’s lawyers, threatening to release intimate photographs unless his people stopped saying the Enquirer was motivated by politics, and published a statement there was no basis for the suggestion.

Since the Medium post, the Bezos side has doubled down on this position. A source close to Bezos told me that de Becker is preparing a 90-page investigative report that will make the case that the Enquirer published the Bezos exposé to curry favor with Saudi investors. Parent company American Media reportedly lost $72 million last year, and the Enquirer’s circulation fell 18 percent to about 265,000. In January, the company raised $460 million to refinance its crushing debt load. The theory is that Saudi Arabia, either directly or indirectly, bailed out A.M.I. as a reward for humiliating an enemy of the regime. (De Becker declined to comment.)

A.M.I. has ample reason to dispute Bezos’s charges, whatever the underlying truth. Pecker has a long-standing relationship with Trump, and the company is dangerously entangled in the Stormy Daniels case. If de Becker’s claims are true, Pecker could be in violation of a non-prosecution agreement with prosecutors in the Southern District of New York. So it makes sense that it’s taking the position that the article was an ordinary gossip story with no political motives, business as usual, paying sources handsomely to drop dimes. A person close to A.M.I. said the source was Michael Sanchez. The person, who says they viewed Michael’s communications with the Enquirer, told me A.M.I. paid Michael $250,0000 for Bezos’s texts and more than a dozen dick pics. Enquirer editor Dylan Howard told de Becker in a phone call that the Enquirer “paid a lot” for the Bezos story, according to a person briefed on the conversation.

Until Bezos accused A.M.I. of extortion, Michael was known as a minor player hustling for scraps on the margins of the entertainment industry. He had worked at ICM and MTV before becoming a talent manager and publicist, and his biggest client seemed to be his sister—a former television host-turned-helicopter entrepreneur who is married to W.M.E. co-C.E.O. Patrick Whitesell. Michael strenuously denied leaking the photos, but was less declarative when I asked about the texts. “I’m not saying I didn’t do something,” Michael told me early in February. “Until I go under oath, what I can tell you now is that ever since April 20, when I met Jeff, my only goal has been to protect Jeff and Lauren.”

Michael is trying to have it multiple ways: he claims not to be responsible for the worst of the leaks, but neither are the Saudis, and A.M.I.’s not so bad either. Michael mainly wants to cast blame on de Becker, whom he accuses of exerting control over Bezos’s personal life. The two advisers have been at odds in the press since the Enquirer published its exposé. “Lauren calls it a cockfight,” Michael has told me. But Michael’s protestations that he has only been acting in the service of a great love story is hard to credit, given that, for the Enquirer story, he may have done something. And he has maintained a friendly relationship with A.M.I. for years.

Michael insists that he “loves Jeff” and wants his sister’s relationship to succeed. Over the last year, he maintains that he served as an unofficial adviser to the couple. “I believe their passion for flying is so sincere and so earnest,” he said. It was Bezos, Michael continued, who made the first move. “When Jeff made the first pass, Lauren was like, ‘What are you doing? We’re just friends. We’re pilots.’” The couple discussed with Michael what would happen if their love affair leaked, Michael said. “The three of us had discussed before that, at some point, this was going to be a scandal. My advice was, ‘Let’s get to the other side.’ Our analogy was always that they were landing a 747. I told them, ‘You’re both pilots, and you’ve never landed a 747, but that’s what we’re trying to do here.’” When the Enquirer called Bezos and Sanchez for comment in early January, as I recently reported, Michael says he and the couple even discussed Bezos buying the Enquirer—the ultimate potential catch and kill.

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Michael told me that Bezos and de Becker are framing the scandal as a pro-Trump political hit job to distract the public from a far simpler story: Bezos cheated on his wife, and de Becker’s security apparatus couldn’t prevent Bezos from being caught. “The whole Saudi Arabia thing is going to explode in Gavin’s face,” Michael said. Michael said de Becker’s judgment is clouded, because he has been trying to break Sanchez and Bezos up to protect MacKenzie Bezos, a close de Becker friend. Sanchez says De Becker told Bezos to agree to a 30-day physical separation from Sanchez, and encouraged Bezos and MacKenzie to undergo couples therapy with celebrity therapists Rae and Judy of Maui Intensives Inc. (Weekly fees start at $12,500, according to their Web site.) “Once Judy and Rae were hired,” Michael said to me, “I told Lauren, ‘Watch out. We’re fucked. Gavin is going to get Jeff back together with MacKenzie.’”

In a series of interviews, Michael insisted Trump had no involvement in the leak of the affair. “I’ve never spoken to Trump,” he said, adding that he is only casual friends with Roger Stone; Carter Page is a client. But on Twitter, he’s a vocal Trump supporter. And it’s evident Trump is thrilled by Bezos’s woes: “So sorry to hear the news about Jeff Bozo being taken down by a competitor whose reporting, I understand, is far more accurate than the reporting in his lobbyist newspaper, the Amazon Washington Post,” he tweeted on January 13.

Ultimately, federal prosecutors will play a role in determining whether Bezos is a victim of blackmail and a political smear, or an unfaithful spouse trying to distract from the fact that he was caught cheating. Bezos and Sanchez are certainly star-crossed. But what better way to prove that love is true than a leak of intimate texts and photographs to The National Enquirer and a federal investigation? And on one point, everyone can agree: “At the end of this, we’re all going to look really, really bad,” Michael said.
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Re: AMI David Pecker: The Blackmail & Extortion of Jeff Bezo

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Mar 30, 2019 7:52 pm

Our investigators and several experts concluded with high confidence that the Saudis had access to Bezos’ phone, and gained private information. As of today, it is unclear to what degree, if any, AMI was aware of the details.


Image

Image

BELTED
Bezos Investigation Finds the Saudis Obtained His Private Data
The National Enquirer’s lawyer tried to get me to say there was no hacking.
Gavin de Becker
Gavin De Becker
03.30.19 5:35 PM ET
OPINION
Photo Illustration by Sarah Rogers/The Daily Beast / Photos by Getty
For 40 years, I’ve advised at-risk public figures and government agencies on high-stakes security matters. My career has included working with the CIA, FBI, at the Reagan White House, counseling foreign leaders, and advising on controversial murder cases. I’ve seen a lot. And yet, I’ve recently seen things that have surprised even me, such as the National Enquirer’s parent company, AMI, being in league with a foreign nation that’s been actively trying to harm American citizens and companies, including the owner of the Washington Post. You know him as Jeff Bezos; I know him as my client of 22 years.

To understand where this story goes, some background is needed.

In January, the National Enquirer published a special edition that revealed an intimate relationship Bezos was having. He asked me to learn who provided his private texts to the Enquirer, and why. My office quickly identified the person whom the Enquirer had paid as a source: a man named Michael Sanchez, the now-estranged brother of Lauren Sanchez, whom Bezos was dating. What was unusual, very unusual, was how hard AMI people worked to publicly reveal their source’s identity. First through strong hints they gave to me, and later through direct statements, AMI practically pinned a “kick me” sign on Michael Sanchez.

“It was not the White House, it was not Saudi Arabia,” a company lawyer said on national television, before telling us more: “It was a person that was known to both Bezos and Ms. Sanchez.” In case even more was needed, he added, “Any investigator that was going to investigate this knew who the source was,” a very helpful hint since the name of who was being investigated had been made public 10 days earlier in a Daily Beast report.

Much was made about a recent front-page story in the Wall Street Journal, fingering Michael Sanchez as the Enquirer’s source—but that information was first published almost seven weeks ago by The Daily Beast, after “multiple sources inside AMI” told The Beast the exact same thing. The actual news in the Journal article was that its reporters were able to confirm a claim Michael Sanchez had been making: It was the Enquirer who first contacted Michael Sanchez about the affair, not the other way around.

AMI has repeatedly insisted they had only one source on their Bezos story, but the Journal reports that when the Enquirer began conversations with Michael Sanchez, they had “already been investigating whether Mr. Bezos and Ms. Sanchez were having an affair.” Michael Sanchez has since confirmed to Page Six that when the Enquirer contacted him back in July, they had already “seen text exchanges” between the couple. If accurate, the WSJ and Page Six stories would mean, clearly and obviously, that the initial information came from other channels—another source or method.

“Bezos directed me to ‘spend whatever is needed’ to learn who may have been complicit in the scheme, and why they did it. That investigation is now complete.”
Reality is complicated, and can’t always be boiled down to a simple narrative like “the brother did it,” even when that brother is a person who certainly supplied some information to a supermarket tabloid, and even when that brother is an associate of Roger Stone and Carter Page. Though interesting, it turns out those truths are also too simple.

Why did AMI’s people work so hard to identify a source, and insist to the New York Times and others that he was their sole source for everything?

My best answer is contained in what happened next: AMI threatened to publish embarrassing photos of Jeff Bezos unless certain conditions were met. (These were photos that, for some reason, they had held back and not published in their first story on the Bezos affair, or any subsequent story.) While a brief summary of those terms has been made public before, others that I’m sharing are new—and they reveal a great deal about what was motivating AMI.

An eight-page contract AMI sent for me and Bezos to sign would have required that I make a public statement, composed by them and then widely disseminated, saying that my investigation had concluded they hadn’t relied upon “any form of electronic eavesdropping or hacking in their news-gathering process.”

Note here that I’d never publicly said anything about electronic eavesdropping or hacking—and they wanted to be sure I couldn’t.

They also wanted me to say our investigation had concluded that their Bezos story was not “instigated, dictated or influenced in any manner by external forces, political or otherwise.” External forces? Such a strange phrase. AMI knew these statements did not reflect my conclusions, because I told AMI’s Chief Content Officer Dylan Howard (in a 90-minute recorded phone call) that what they were asking me to say about external forces and hacking “is not my truth,” and would be “just echoing what you are looking for.”

(Indeed, an earlier set of their proposed terms included AMI making a statement “affirming that it undertook no electronic eavesdropping in connection with its reporting and has no knowledge of such conduct” – but now they wanted me to say that for them.)

The contract further held that if Bezos or I were ever in our lives to “state, suggest or allude to” anything contrary to what AMI wanted said about electronic eavesdropping and hacking, then they could publish the embarrassing photos.


Todd Williamson/Getty
I’m writing this today because it’s exactly what the Enquirer scheme was intended to prevent me from doing. Their contract also contained terms that would have inhibited both me and Bezos from initiating a report to law enforcement.

Things didn’t work out as they hoped.

When the terms for avoiding publication of personal photos were presented to Jeff Bezos, he responded immediately: “No thank you.” Within hours, he wrote an essay describing his reasons for rejecting AMI’s threatening proposal. Then he posted it all on Medium, including AMI’s actual emails and their salacious descriptions of private photos. (After the Medium post, AMI put out a limp statement saying it “believed fervently that it acted lawfully in the reporting of the story of Mr. Bezos.”)

The issues Bezos raised in his Medium post have nothing whatsoever to do with Michael Sanchez, any more than revealing the name of a low-level Watergate burglar sheds light on the architects of the Watergate cover-up. Bezos was not expressing concerns about the Enquirer’s original story; he was focused on what he called “extortion and blackmail.”

Next, Bezos directed me to “spend whatever is needed” to learn who may have been complicit in the scheme, and why they did it.

That investigation is now complete. As has been reported elsewhere, my results have been turned over to federal officials. Since it is now out of my hands, I intend today’s writing to be my last public statement on the matter. Further, to respect officials pursuing this case, I won’t disclose details from our investigation. I am, however, comfortable confirming one key fact:

Our investigators and several experts concluded with high confidence that the Saudis had access to Bezos’ phone, and gained private information. As of today, it is unclear to what degree, if any, AMI was aware of the details.

“Our investigators and several experts concluded with high confidence that the Saudis had access to Bezos’ phone, and gained private information.”
We did not reach our conclusions lightly. The inquiry included a broad array of resources: investigative interviews with current and former AMI executives and sources, extensive discussions with top Middle East experts in the intelligence community, leading cyber security experts who have tracked Saudi spyware, discussions with current and former advisers to President Trump, Saudi whistleblowers, people who personally know the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman (also known as MBS), people who work with his close associate Saud al-Qahtani, Saudi dissidents, and other targets of Saudi action, including writer/activist Iyad el-Baghdadi.

Experts with whom we consulted confirmed New York Times reports on the Saudi capability to “collect vast amounts of previously inaccessible data from smartphones in the air without leaving a trace—including phone calls, texts, emails”—and confirmed that hacking was a key part of the Saudi’s “extensive surveillance efforts that ultimately led to the killing of [Washington Post] journalist Jamal Khashoggi.”

Some Americans will be surprised to learn that the Saudi government has been very intent on harming Jeff Bezos since last October, when the Post began its relentless coverage of Khashoggi’s murder. The Saudi campaign against Bezos has already been reported by CNN International, Bloomberg, The Daily Beast, and others.

Saudi Arabia attacks people in many ways, obviously, including through their elaborate social media program that uses sophisticated technology and paid surrogates to create artificially trending hashtags. To give you an idea of how this program has infected the U.S., the New York Times reported that the Saudis even had an operative inside Twitter, which fired the suspect employee, and later advised select activists and others that “your Twitter account is one of a small group of accounts that may have been targeted by state-sponsored actors.”

In October, the Saudi government unleashed its cyber army on Bezos (and later me). Their multi-pronged campaign included public calls for boycotts against Amazon.com and its Saudi subsidiary, Souq.com. Just three examples among thousands:

“We as Saudis will never accept to be attacked by the Washington Post in the morning, only to buy products from Amazon and Souq.com by night! Strange that all three companies are owned by the same Jew who attacks us by day, and sells us products by night!”
“Our weapon is to boycott… because the owner of the newspaper is the same as their owner.”
“We're after you - the Jew, worshipper of money, will go bankrupt by the will of God at the hands of Saudi Arabia... the owner of Amazon and Souq is the owner of the Washington Post is the spiteful Jew who insults us every day.”
Bezos is not Jewish, but you get the point.

We studied the well-documented and close relationship between MBS and AMI chairman, David Pecker. That alliance includes David Pecker bringing MBS intermediary Kacy Grine to a private White House meeting with President Trump and Jared Kushner. Mr. Pecker has also traveled to Saudi Arabia to meet with the Crown Prince. Though we don’t know what was discussed in those private meetings, AMI’s actions afterwards are telling. To coincide with MBS’ March 2018 U.S. tour, AMI created a 100-page, ad-free, glossy magazine called The New Kingdom. Since MBS wasn’t yet a notorious figure in the West (this was before the murder of Jamal Khashoggi), AMI’s magazine introduced him to Americans as “the most influential Arab leader—transforming the world at 32,” and “improving lives of his people & hopes for peace.”

The Associated Press reported that AMI sent an advance digital copy of their laudatory magazine to the Saudi Embassy three weeks before printing and distributing 200,000 issues. (Despite AP’s substantial forensic evidence, the kingdom denied it received the magazine’s content in advance. While we’re on denials, the kingdom says Saudi Arabia had nothing to with the Bezos matter. The kingdom also says MBS had nothing whatsoever to do with the murder of Jamal Khashoggi.)

When AMI publicly insisted that nobody outside of their executives and editors “had any influence on this publication or its content,” I guess they meant other than Kacy Grine, the very same MBS-intermediary Pecker had brought to The White House. I say that because AMI soon had to disclose to the Department of Justice National Security Division that their mystery magazine included content written by Grine, and that they also gave him the whole working draft for advance review, and that he suggested changes, and that they implemented his changes, and that he provided better photographs of MBS. With friends like AMI, you don’t need… publicists.

My firm has done many investigations into Enquirer misconduct, including one that became the subject of a 60 Minutes investigative piece way back in 1990. Before then, tabloids had been seen as almost funny publications, mixing celebrity gossip with space aliens and Elvis sightings. But when the Enquirer’s on-again-off-again relationship with the truth percolated into politics, it wasn’t so funny anymore.

Though relatively benign at first (“Al Gore’s Diet Is Making Him Stupid”), the Trump/Pecker relationship has metastasized: In effect, the Enquirer became an enforcement arm of the Trump presidential campaign, and presidency, as the U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York laid out in its case against Michael Cohen, who has pleaded guilty. The U.S. Attorney has done the country a service by levying extensive controls on AMI, David Pecker, and his deputy Dylan Howard, through a non-prosecution agreement that requires them to commit no other crimes for three years, and requires everyone at AMI to attend annual training on federal election laws. I’m guessing that’s not how they used to spend their time.

JUST ONE CLICK
Bezos Could Put National Enquirer Brass in Jail
Michael Daly

I would be wrong to imply that the Enquirer hasn’t evolved since the 90s, because it has. The tabloid and its chairman have evolved into secretly entangling with a nation-state that’s using its enormous resources to harm American citizens and companies. And now they’ve evolved into trying to strong-arm an American citizen whom that country’s leadership wanted harmed, compromised, and silenced.

As for the Saudi side of the equation: Not only does the kingdom have a close alliance with AMI—which owns the Enquirer, Us Weekly, the Star, Globe, Radar Online, and many other publications—but the Saudis have pursued investments and partnerships involving Rolling Stone, Variety, Deadline, the Robb Report, and National Geographic, among others.

Unlike these publications, it’s clear that MBS considers the Washington Post to be a major enemy. Saudi Arabia is hardly the first repressive regime that seeks total control of the news media in its own country. Wanting to control the media in the United States—and using any means to do so—will hopefully prove to be an overreach.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/jeff-bezo ... ref=scroll
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Re: AMI David Pecker: The Blackmail & Extortion of Jeff Bezo

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Apr 10, 2019 9:08 pm

WaPo follows the money: the National Enquirer is up for sale because "the hedge fund manager whose firm controls American Media became 'disgusted' with the Enquirer's reporting tactics..."


Exclusive: Jeff Bezos to meet with federal prosecutors on extortion and hacking claims

(CNN) — Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is scheduled to meet with federal prosecutors in New York as soon as this week, according to people familiar with the matter. The meeting signals that the US attorney's office is escalating its inquiry connected to Bezos's suggestion that the kingdom of Saudi Arabia was behind a National Enquirer story that exposed his extramarital affair and his claim that the tabloid attempted to extort him.

Plans for that meeting come as prosecutors in the Southern District of New York are seeking to obtain access to Bezos's electronic devices, these people said. They are attempting to examine Bezos's private investigators' allegation that the Saudis "gained private information" from his phone, and that such information wound up in the hands of American Media Inc. tabloid the National Enquirer, which published Bezos's texts.

Attorneys for Bezos, the world's richest man, have been engaged in negotiations regarding his electronics. In recent weeks, Bezos's attorneys and investigators turned over to federal authorities documents and other material from their own inquiry, but not his devices, these people said.

Bezos has suggested he became a target of the Saudis due to his ownership of The Washington Post and its coverage of the murder of its columnist Jamal Khashoggi.

Amid these developments, Bezos has expanded his legal team, adding attorney Matthew Schwartz, a partner at law firm Boies Schiller Flexner LLP who spent a decade as a federal prosecutor in New York, the people familiar with the matter said.

Schwartz didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. A spokeswoman for the US attorney's office declined to comment. A spokesman for the FBI declined to comment.

It's not clear whether federal prosecutors have independent evidence to corroborate the claim that the Saudis hacked Bezos's phone or had any connection to the National Enquirer's story on his affair.

Since February, prosecutors have been examining Bezos's claim that the publisher attempted to extort him after he sought to determine how the National Enquirer gained access to private texts he exchanged with a woman named Lauren Sanchez, with whom he was having an extramarital affair.

MacKenzie Bezos will keep 25% of the Bezos' Amazon stock. Jeff Bezos keeps the voting power
Prosecutors have been probing the extortion claim in part to determine whether the actions of the National Enquirer's publisher, American Media, violated a non-prosecution agreement it struck last year with prosecutors. As part of that agreement, company officials admitted to its involvement in a hush-money scheme to influence the 2016 presidential election by silencing a woman who claimed an affair with then-candidate Donald Trump and agreed not to commit any crimes for three years.

The agreement stemmed from prosecutors' investigation of Trump's former personal attorney Michael Cohen, who helped orchestrate that hush-money payment.

Prosecutors haven't reached a determination concerning the extortion claim, according to a person familiar with the investigation, and they are now working to examine another set of claims -- those made last month by Bezos's security consultant, Gavin de Becker.

"Our investigators and several experts concluded with high confidence that the Saudis had access to Bezos' phone, and gained private information," de Becker wrote in an opinion article in the Daily Beast. "As of today, it is unclear to what degree, if any, AMI was aware of the details."
De Becker wrote that while his investigation found that AMI had paid Sanchez's brother, Michael Sanchez, for the information on Bezos, the Saudis were the original source of at least some of the material.

Bezos himself had suggested in his own online post that he had become the enemy of Saudi Arabia and Trump due to coverage of the murder of Khashoggi in the Washington Post, and pointed out that AMI had long sought to ingratiate itself with both the kingdom and the President.

Saudi Arabia denies any role in Jeff Bezos' affair leak
A spokesman for the publisher has said "American Media does not have, nor have we ever had, any editorial or financial ties to Saudi Arabia."

Following the publication of de Becker's op-ed, the publisher issued a statement saying Sanchez alone was the source for its reporting. "Despite the false and unsubstantiated claims of Mr. de Becker, American Media has, and continues to, refute the claims that the materials for our report were acquired with the help of anyone other than the single source who first brought them to us," the company said. "There was no involvement by any other third party whatsoever."

An attorney for AMI CEO David Pecker, Elkan Abramowitz, said in February that the source for the tabloid's story was "not Saudi Arabia."

Adel al-Jubeir, Saudi Arabia's former minister for foreign affairs, told CBS News that the government had "nothing to do with" the matter.

Though de Becker wrote that the results of his investigation had been turned over to federal officials, it is standard practice for prosecutors to conduct their own examination of such allegations, and, in the case of a hacking claim, to seek first-hand access to the electronics that were allegedly compromised.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/10/politics ... index.html


PISSED OFF THE WRONG BILLIONAIRE
Could Jeff Bezos Finally Crush The National Enquirer?
It’s a bad day for Trump’s favorite tabloid as American Media Inc. looks to sell the Enquirer and Jeff Bezos reportedly talks to prosecutors about his extortion and hacking claims.
Julia Arciga

04.10.19 9:05 PM ET

Bloomberg
American Media Inc., the publisher of the National Enquirer, is seeking to sell the embattled tabloid just as Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is reportedly meeting with New York federal prosecutors over extortion and hacking claims that he and his associates have made against the publisher.

Earlier this year, the Enquirer enraged the billionaire after it ran a story on his alleged extramarital affair with media personality Lauren Sanchez. Bezos fired back with a scathing post on Medium in which he claimed that the Enquirer had tried to extort him with dick pics. Bezos’ security consultant, Gavin de Becker, also accused AMI of being “in league” in Saudi Arabia in a Daily Beast op-ed.

On Wednesday evening, American Media Inc. said it was exploring “strategic options for its National Enquirer (U.S. and UK editions), Globe and National Examiner brands” in a press release. The publisher said it expected a sale to occur “in the near future.”

"We have been keenly focused on leveraging the popularity of our celebrity glossy, teen and active lifestyle brands while developing new and robust platforms including broadcast and audio programming, and a live events business, that now deliver significant revenue streams," AMI President David Pecker wrote in the release. "Because of this focus, we feel the future opportunities with the tabloids can be best exploited by a different ownership."

However, The Washington Post reported that the internal decision for AMI to sell the Enquirer was driven by hedge fund manager Anthony Melchiorre, who has an 80 percent stake in AMI. A source told the newspaper that Melchiorre was “really disgusted” by the Enquirer’s reporting on Bezos’ extramarital affair.

The Enquirer allegedly paid Sanchez’s brother for photographic evidence of her affair with the mogul—and, Bezos claimed in a blog post earlier this year, tried to blackmail him before it ran its story on the tryst.

BELTED
Bezos Investigation Finds Saudis Obtained His Private Data

Gavin De Becker

“Any personal embarrassment AMI could cause me takes a back seat because there’s a much more important matter involved here,” Bezos wrote. “If in my position I can’t stand up to this kind of extortion, how many people can?”

De Becker and Bezos have also hinted that Bezos might have been a target for the Saudis due to the CEO’s ownership of the Post. Jamal Khashoggi, a columnist for the Post who was deeply critical of the Saudi government and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, was killed late last year in Istanbul’s Saudi Arabian consulate. In his op-ed, de Becker wrote that the “Saudi government has been intent on harming Jeff Bezos since last October, when the Post began its relentless coverage of Khashoggi’s murder.”

“Our investigators and several experts concluded with high confidence that the Saudis had access to Bezos’ phone, and gained private information,” de Becker wrote. “As of today, it is unclear to what degree, if any, AMI was aware of the details.”

Bezos will be addressing both his allegations of extortion and de Becker’s allegations of hacking in meetings with the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York, according to CNN.

Federal prosecutors have already been probing Bezos' extortion claim, and have yet to come to any conclusions. To investigate the hacking claims, the New York federal prosecutors are reportedly seeking to gain access to Bezos's electronics and Bezos has been “in negotiations” with prosecutors. Matthew Schwartz, a lawyer for Bezos, did not respond to CNN's request for comment. A spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office and the FBI also reportedly declined to comment.

Beyond the Bezos incident, AMI acknowledged paying ex-Playboy model Karen McDougal $150,000 for her story about her alleged affair with President Trump—a Pecker pal—in a catch-and-kill scheme. The deal was allegedly made in order to prevent the story from being published and “influencing the election.” AMI was also involved with a similar catch-and-kill deal with adult film star Stormy Daniels—who also claimed she had an affair with Trump.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/could-jef ... l-enquirer
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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