Donald Trump Biographer Reveals That The President Had Him Investigated In Order To Silence Him
Investigative reporter and Trump biographer, David Cay Johnston, who wrote The Making of Donald Trump, told MSNBC’s Joy Reid that the President had him investigated once in an effort to silence him, according to Newsweek.
The segment on MSNBC revolved around the falling out from the Jeff Bezos’s controversy. As reported by the Guardian, the Amazon chief and the richest man in the world recently ended his 25-year-old marriage to novelist MacKenzie Bezos, following which the National Enquirer published a story detailing his extra-marital affair as the reason behind the split. Bezos subsequently accused the Enquirer of having political motives. In a blog post, he alleged that the Enquirer engaged in catch-and-kill agreements at the behest of Trump. The tabloid reportedly also killed stories relating to Trump’s extra-marital affairs with adult star Stormy Daniels.
MSNBC host Joy Reid asked Johnston, who has observed Trump closely, more about this relationship between Trump and the tabloid. Johnston responded by saying that Trump has long engaged in having the personal lives of his enemies investigated in order to blackmail them later. He said he could speak with such confidence because he has been at the receiving end of Trump’s ire himself.
“Well, Donald has long had other people investigated to try and get them to back off. He did it to me. And the whole model here is one of, as we’ve been discussing, extortion — of suppressing news,” Johnston said.
“A lot of things I’ve written about Donald Trump in my biography, The Making of Donald Trump, they’re not in the news for reasons that in some cases have to do with his threatening news organizations if they touched those stories, even though they’re in the public record. And in the past, journalists who have committed extortion like this go to jail.”
Pulitzer-winning reporter David Cay Johnston: "The evidence suggests Trump is a traitor" | https://t.co/ASy5BDpHHH https://t.co/u4Td8ZU8AS
— Linda Boyd-Dickson (@adnildyob) February 10, 2019
Johnston is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who published The Making of Donald Trump in 2016 — a biography of the then businessman and presidential candidate who had surprised his way into Republican contention at the time. In 2018, he published another book grimly observant of Trump’s policies and what his tenure as the president meant for America in a book titled It’s Even Worse Than You Think: What the Trump Administration is Doing to America.
Trump going after his enemies through the help of private investigators and tabloid reporters is not the only revelation Johnston has made recently. According to Raw Story, he told CNN’s Erin Burnett that he suspected Trump of having connections with the “mob guys.”
