MANHATTAN (CN) – In an extraordinary blog post accusing President Donald Trump’s favorite supermarket tabloid of “extortion and blackmail,” Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos expressed his desire to “roll this log over, and see what crawls out.”
One of those repercussions could be the end of a nonprosecution agreement that American Media Inc., the National Enquirer’s parent company, struck with federal prosecutors this past summer.
After admitting that it participated in a “catch-and-kill” conspiracy to influence the 2016 presidential election, AMI avoided prosecution by promising to stay on the right side of the law — a commitment that accusations from the world’s richest man put in jeopardy.
Bezos on Thursday published multiple emails from earlier this week in which AMI executives threaten to release intimate photos of the Amazon CEO and his alleged mistress, Lauren Sanchez, including a “below the belt selfie.”
The exchange followed the National Enquirer’s publication last month of racy text messages between Bezos and Sanchez.
Suspecting that the investigation was politically motivated, Bezos said he hired a private investigator. The emails appear to show AMI executives telling Bezos that the Enquirer would print his “dick pick” [sic] if he did not drop that probe.
With New York federal prosecutors now probing whether those emails constitute a breach of AMI’s nonprosecution deal, former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance said that there would be no shortage of criminal statutes appearing to fit this conduct.
“This set of facts looks like our sort of community understanding of what blackmail and extortion is, trying to get somebody to give you something in exchange for not releasing embarrassing material about them,” said Vance, who teaches at the University of Alabama School of Law after a 25-year stint as the Alabama federal prosecutor.
“There is a big family of extortion-related crimes in the federal system and so, prosecutors will go through each one of those statues systematically to see if they have evidence to establish that AMI has established one of them,” she added.
Vance believed that any breach of AMI’s cooperation agreement would be unlikely to undermine ongoing criminal investigations.
“The downside would all be to AMI,” she said. “They would become subject to prosecution. Perhaps some of their principals would become subject to prosecution if prosecutors chose to do that. They might or might not. In terms of what it would do to prosecutors’ case, one suspects that they have that locked down in grand jury, and it would be very difficult for anyone at AMI to back out of what they said under oath or any physical evidence that they’ve provided."
The geopolitical fallout of possible prosecution is also an open question.
In his blog post, Bezos said that he had looked into “various actions” AMI's CEO David Pecker and his company have taken on behalf of the Saudi government.
“Several days ago, an AMI leader advised us that Mr. Pecker is ‘apoplectic about our investigation,” Bezos wrote. “For reasons still to be better understood, the Saudi angle seems to hit a particularly sensitive nerve.”
Since the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, the paper’s aggressive coverage of his brutal killing inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul has been a public-relations disaster for the Trump administration’s relationship with the kingdom.
Last month, Trump fired off a tweet of gleeful schadenfreude after the Enquirer’s publication of Bezos’ racy texts.
“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,” Trump wrote (spelling in original). “Hopefully, the paper will soon be placed in better & more responsible hands!”
