AMAZON CEO ACCUSES NATIONAL ENQUIRER OF EXTORTION & BLACKMAIL

…Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, owner of The Washington Post

Jeff Bezos and Ronan Farrow, both received extortion threats from American Media Inc.

There are three specific individuals involved in the National Enquirer / American Media Inc. (AMI), Amazon, Washington Post scandal, and they are all very interesting individuals.

Person number one is Jeffrey Bezos, the wealthiest person in the world who is the Founder and CEO of AMAZON and he is also the owner of the Washington Post.

Person number two is David Pecker who is the Chief Executive of American Media Inc. and AMI is the parent company of the National Enquirer tabloid.

Person number three is Ronan Farrow, who is a contributing writer to The New Yorker magazine.  He is also an investigative reporter whose work appears on HBO.  Farrow is also a lawyer, and a former government advisor.  He is the son of actress Mia Farrow and writer/director Woody Allen, and his current business partner is Jon Lovett.

This latest sensational story is that Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos has announced that he was the target of an extortion and blackmail effort by the National Enquirer, which he accuses of threatening to publish intimate pictures of him and his mistress, TV anchor Lauren Sanchez, unless he and The Post backed off an investigation of the tabloid.

Ronan Farrow is involved with this event as he had said this week that he and “at least one other prominent journalist” who had reported on the National Enquirer and on President Trump, they had received blackmail threats from the tabloid’s parent company, American Media Inc., over their work.

Farrow’s allegation came just hours after the Amazon chief had published the public post accusing the National Enquirer of attempting to extort and blackmail him unless the Washington Post stopped investigating the publication.

In a tweet that same night, Farrow wrote that he and the unnamed journalist “fielded similar ‘stop digging or we’ll ruin you’ blackmail efforts from AMI.”  Last April, Farrow had published a story in the New Yorker about the Enquirer’s “catch and kill” practice in which stories are buried by paying off sources that benefited Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign.  In another, separate series of stories that Farrow wrote, he had exposed the sexual activities of the movie producer Harvey Weinstein in 2018.

Bezos, had written that the Enquirer wanted him to make a false public statement that he and his security consultant, Gavin de Becker, “have no knowledge or basis for suggesting that AMI’s coverage was politically motivated or influenced by political forces.”  Bezos declined to do so.

Instead, Bezos published what he said were emails from Enquirer executives to a lawyer representing de Becker.  In one, top Enquirer editor Dylan Howard appears to suggest that the tabloid would publish a series of photos of Bezos and of Sanchez, some of them salacious, if AMI’s terms weren’t met.

“I wanted to describe to you the photos obtained during our newsgathering,” Howard wrote, going on to say that the Enquirer had a “below the belt selfie” of Bezos, among other shots. Howard added, “It would give no editor pleasure to send this email. I hope common sense can prevail .

On Jan. 9, 2019, Bezos and his wife, MacKenzie, revealed they would be divorcing after 25 years of marriage.  This was two days after the Enquirer had informed Bezos that it would be publishing a story about his relationship with Sanchez.  The Enquirer later published what it called “sleazy text messages and gushing love notes” between Bezos and Sanchez, raising questions about how the tabloid was able to get such intimate material.  Bezos began to investigate how the leak of his private information came about.

AMI’s chief executive has had a long friendship with President Trump, and Pecker has repeatedly attacked Bezos, Amazon and The Washington Post.  Pecker directed the Enquirer to write favorable stories about Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign, while paying $150,000 to former Playboy model Karen McDougal to suppress her claim of a long-running affair with Trump.

On Feb. 5, The Post reported that Bezos and his consultant, de Becker, suspected that the source of the text and photo leaks may have been Ms. Sanchez’s brother, Michael.  Michael Sanchez is a Republican, and a California public relations executive who is very close to Pecker and various figures in Trump’s orbit.  That includes the former campaign advisers Roger Stone and Carter Page.  Michael Sanchez has of course, denied any involvement in revealing his sister’s relationship with Bezos.

The Post reported that Michael Sanchez said he was told by multiple people at AMI that the Enquirer set out to do “a takedown to make Trump happy.”

Pecker is now cooperating with federal investigators who are looking into the company’s involvement with the Trump campaign.

There is a long-time feud between President Trump and Bezos, due to the reporting of The Washington Post.  President Trump actually push to have the US Post Office double the rate the Postal Service charges Amazon, and it was not the first time that Trump and Amazon have clashed.  Of course, the Post Office of course did not double Amazon's postal rates.

Bezos’s public letter seems to suggest that federal agents should investigate whether AMI may have violated the terms of its non-prosecution agreement with the federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York, over AMI’s role in the 2016 hush money payments.

“Rather than capitulate to extortion and blackmail, I’ve decided to publish exactly what they sent me, despite the personal cost and embarrassment they threaten,” Bezos wrote.  In the next sentence, Bezos describes the non-prosecution agreement struck in September between AMI and the Justice Department.

Robert Mintz, a former federal prosecutor now in private practice, said Bezos’s allegations, if accurate, could have serious consequences for both the prosecutors and AMI.

“This could constitute criminal conduct in the eyes of a prosecutor, if these allegations are true,” said Mintz. “For prosecutors, your worst nightmare is watching a cooperation deal unravel.  Alleged conduct like this puts them in the position to rethink that deal and potentially turn around and have to prosecute AMI, and that undermines their ability to continue to use them to assist in other ongoing investigations.”

Representatives of AMI had no immediate comment on Thursday.

Bezos said in his post that the tabloid threatened to keep the photos on hand and publish them in the future “if we ever deviate from [the] lie” that politics played no role in the Enquirer’s pursuit of Bezos’s relationship with Lauren Sanchez.

In addition, Bezos included emails from AMI’s deputy general counsel, Jon Fine, detailing a list of terms under which AMI said it would withhold publication of the photos. One of those terms was for Bezos to issue a false statement from himself and de Becker “affirming that they have no knowledge or basis for suggesting that [AMI’s] coverage was politically motivated or influenced by political forces.”

In his post, Bezos called his ownership of The Post “a complexifier” for him.  He wrote that it’s “unavoidable that certain powerful people who experience Washington Post news coverage will wrongly conclude I am their enemy.  President Trump is one of those people, that is obvious by his many tweets.  Also, The Post’s essential and unrelenting coverage of the murder of its columnist Jamal Khashoggi is undoubtedly unpopular in certain [Trump] circles.”

Despite mounting evidence, Trump has disputed that Khashoggi was killed on the orders of Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Mohammed bin Salman (MBS). The Saudi crown prince was the subject of a flattering glossy magazine produced by AMI in 2016, at a time when the Saudi regime was attempting to portray Mohammed as a reformer in Middle Eastern politics.

It is unknown where AMI came up with the money to finance the printing and distribution of the flashy, expensive, magazine, and to have it displayed on every supermarket check out stand in the US.  The sales of the magazine did not come near to covering its cost.

The Enquirer has said that it obtained the texts and photos of Bezos lawfully, but hey offered no proof of that statement.  They said that it had the right to publish the material under the “fair use” doctrine of copyright law.  It also said the photos were legally newsworthy, given Bezos’s prominence.

But as Bezos began to investigate the leak, the tabloid’s parent again disputed any suggestion that its story was politically motivated. The company “emphatically rejects any assertion that its reporting was instigated, dictated or influenced in any manner by external forces, political or otherwise,” Fine wrote in an email to de Becker’s lawyer, Martin Singer, which Bezos shared. “Simply put, this was and is a news story.”

Ted Boutrous, a veteran lawyer who briefly represented the Playboy model McDougal, in the dispute with the Enquirer, said the emails Bezos described in his post are “a textbook example of blackmail and extortion. It’s ripped right out of the law books.”

He added, “At an extreme level, this shows how frightening it should be to the citizens of the United States that the National Enquirer reportedly has a safe full of information about the president of the United States. That’s one of the dangers to democracy of what they were engaged in when they were catching and killing information, they could have used it against Candidate Trump and now President Trump. . . . It’s a shocking and frightening thing Mr. Bezos has revealed.”

You can't make this stuff up!

Copyright G. Ater 2019