Ronan Farrow Calls Trump Verdict ‘a Reaffirmation of How Important the Press Is to Our Democracy’ | Video

Donald Trump’s guilty verdict on all 34 counts in his hush money trial “is a reaffirmation of how important the press is to our democracy” Ronan Farrow told Anderson Cooper Thursday night. Farrow, who was part of the team at the New Yorker who broke stories relevant to the case, added, “And a lot of us who worked on this story, you also were in receipt of some of this when you did your interview with Karen McDougall, really got a lot of blowback.”

“When I was first exposing the love child and the suppression of that story, the Karen McDougall details, the Enquirer and AMI, they came after me so hard,” Farrow continued. “And it was my job at the time to not linger on that or talk about it publicly too much.”

“But I do think it’s worth noting now in retrospect because it was a hard price to pay. It messed me up for a long time and I’m still kind of recovering from some of the things they did,” he said.

Farrow added that following the verdict, many of his colleagues who helped expose Trump admitted they “wish we weren’t associated with this sort of filthy enterprise of catching and killing stories for the Enquirer” in the first place.

The “Catch and Kill” author added that he felt the tide had turned against Trump after the jury, made up of seven men and five women, asked to rehear testimony from former American Media CEO David Pecker. As he explained, the story that Trump paid off adult entertainment star Stormy Daniels to stay quiet about their affair doesn’t make sense “without first establishing that there was this conspiracy between A.M.I. and Donald Trump, that that meeting at Trump Tower in 2015 really did hatch a plan to subvert the election, as prosecutors said.”

That the jury wanted to be clear about what did and didn’t happen at that meeting was an indication about where they stood. “I have sources within A.M.I. who told me today when we heard that news, when we heard they were asking about the Trump Tower meeting, asking about Pecker, we understood that the jury bought the premise being given to them by the prosecution,” Farrow explained.

The 2015 meeting in question is when Pecker agreed to be the “eyes and ears” of the Trump campaign and took on the responsibility of tracking and flagging unfavorable news stories for Michael Cohen. The jury’s interest in understanding this meeting likely meant they wanted to completely understand what the three men spoke about, and whether or not Trump knew about the hush money payment from beginning to end.

“They held this meeting and it was Trump and Cohen approaching Pecker, not Pecker approaching them about how can I help,” Farrow explained. “It was them approaching Pecker about what can you do for the campaign.”

“And that’s why it’s relevant that so many sources around us, people who were in those rooms or close to those rooms, executing these transactions, had these misgivings at the time, knew what it was and saw it the way the prosecution ultimately framed it for this jury.”

Watch the interview with Ronan Farrow in the video above.

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