CYBERSPACE—After reporting two weeks ago that a $1.6 million payoff to Playboy model Shera Bechard by a top Republican fundraiser may in fact have been made as part of a cover-up for Donald Trump, New York Magazine on Tuesday published a new story claiming that “more evidence” points to the fact that it was Trump—not GOP money man Elliot Broidy—who had an affair with Bechard, allegedly resulting in her pregnancy and subsequent abortion.
According to law professor Paul Campos, who wrote both the original article and Tuesday’s follow-up, Trump and Broidy held a meeting on December 2, just two days after Broidy sent the first $200,000 installment of a reported $1.6 million payoff to Bechard mean to buy her silence about the affair.
In April of this year, just days after federal investigators raided the home, office and hotel room of Trump’s personal “fixer” Michael Cohen—raids in which they seized documents related to the Broidy-Bechard payoff—reporters contacted the 62-year-old Broidy, who immediately “confessed” to the affair with the 34-year-old Bechard, and to impregnating her.
But according to Campos as well as other media reports, Broidy’s story did not add up.
“Broidy is a very rich man, but not necessarily someone who has occasion to hang out with Playboy models, unlike some people you might be familiar with. And he was not a public figure, which makes the $1.6 million payoff seem wildly excessive,” wrote Washington Post opinion columnist Paul Waldman on Tuesday. “To put it bluntly, $1.6 million is ‘Keep this out of the papers because it’ll be a huge story’ money, not ‘Don’t tell my wife’ money. And why would Broidy, who has access to the most high-priced and discreet legal talent in the country, retain someone like Cohen to take care of this delicate matter for him?”
The answer, according to Campos in his article on Tuesday—which may be accessed at this link—is that the $1.6 million was in effect nothing more than a bribe to Trump, paid by Broidy, who has a history of bribing public officials, having been convicted of exactly that offense in 2009.
But what did Broidy receive in return for his bribe? The Daily Beast on Monday had a possible answer. Since Trump took office in January of 2017, Broidy’s private security firm, Circinus LLC, has raked in a whopping $800 million in foreign defense contracts. In addition, in August and September of 2017, Broidy’s company took in $4 million from a United States Defense Department contract.
Prior to 2017, Broidy’s firm had received all of $7,501 in U.S. defense contracts, The Daily Beast reported.
But there was another seeming return for Broidy on his investment of $1.6 million, according to the Campos theory. Broidy spent much of 2017 pitching his access to Trump to top officials in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, in an attempt to secure consulting contracts from those governments, according to an Associated Press investigative report published on Monday. Broidy was selling the two countries on his ability to turn Trump against Qatar, a bitter rival of both the UAE and Saudi Arabia.
Just two days after his meeting with Trump—at which, according to Broidy himself, he and Trump discussed his anti-Qatar push—Broidy’s company received a commitment from the UAE for $600 million in contracts over the next five years, making his $1.6 million payoff to Bechard seem like a small price to pay.
In the non-disclosure agreement Broidy signed with Bechard, he used the alias “David Dennison,” the same alias used by Trump in his NDA forcing Stormy Daniels to keep quiet about her own alleged affair with Trump.
“If it’s difficult to imagine Broidy being willing to take the fall for Trump’s affair with Bechard and then paying her a seven-figure sum,” wrote Campos in his New York article, “it’s much simpler to imagine it simply as a perfectly timed and fantastically profitable bribe.”
Photos by Glenn Francis / Michael Vadon / Wikimedia Commons
