They’re not about to go soft on him.
The National Enquirer may have just scuttled its plea deal with the feds involving a Playboy model and President Trump — and exposed its CEO, David Pecker, to federal charges — by threatening to publish photos of Jeff Bezos’ junk.
Manhattan federal prosecutors are investigating whether the Enquirer violated its cooperation agreement over hush money paid to alleged Trump mistress Karen McDougal — after the Amazon founder accused the tabloid of trying to extort him with nude selfies, sources told The Post.
The tabloid’s parent company, American Media Inc., cut a deal with the Manhattan US Attorney’s Office last year to dodge campaign-finance-violation charges for paying McDougal $150,000 to silence her claims about Trump, a longtime pal of Pecker’s.
But under the deal, all bets are off if AMI is busted committing any more crimes — and legal experts say that’s a big problem for the company if it did indeed try to extort Bezos.
“The sword of Damocles will be hanging over their head,” said Jeff Tsai, a former federal prosecutor.
“In the event there is, in fact, a federal crime that’s determined to have occurred, then AMI and Mr. Pecker have a real problem on their hands.”
In a bombshell online post Thursday, Bezos accused AMI and Pecker of “extortion and blackmail,” claiming they threatened to release lewd images of him if he didn’t stop investigating how the company got its hands on the compromising material and issue a statement saying the tabloid’s coverage of him was not “politically motivated.”
In the post, on the publishing site Medium, Bezos reproduces what he says is an email in which the tabloid describes 10 photos it has in its possession — including a “below the belt selfie,” an image of his “semi-erect manhood” poking through the zipper of his shorts and another of his mistress, Lauren Sanchez, “smoking a cigar in what appears to be a simulated oral sex scene.”
Bezos had charged his security chief, Gavin de Becker, with finding out how the Enquirer obtained the couple’s sexts, some of which it splashed across its pages in January in exposing their affair.
De Becker had recently told several news outlets — including the Bezos-owned Washington Post — that it was a “politically motivated” leak aimed at shaming his boss.
Tsai said he thinks there is a “real question” if this is a case of federal extortion, which he explained as using threats to coerce “someone to give you something in exchange for something else.
“We have seen, in fact, a demand for something, in exchange for AMI not revealing scandalous material against Mr. Bezos. So it has that classic ring in and of extortion itself,” he said.
Still, another legal eagle said it wasn’t a cut-and-dry case because it doesn’t involve physical threats or demands for money.
“Instead, what we have here is the threat of reputational crime,” said Robert Mintz, a former federal prosecutor and current partner at McCarter & English.
“What this case turns on … is whether the threat, in this case, amounts to a threat to injure an individual. And whether what AMI has demanded — a public statement — is something of value.”
Even if the feds think extortion occurred, they may still not charge AMI or its executives for that crime — instead just using it as a precursor to go ahead with the hush-money case, according to former federal prosecutor Anthony Capozzolo.
“Often times that does not occur unless it’s a substantially more serious charge,” said Capozzolo, now a partner at Lewis Baach Kaufmann Middlemiss PLLC.
Several news outlets last year reported that Pecker had an immunity deal for the campaign-finance charge, but it’s unclear if the terms of that supposed agreement would protect him in this case.
Either way, if extortion is proven in Bezos’ case, any testimony that Pecker gave to a grand jury regarding the hush money could be used to pin that charge on his company, Capozzolo said.
Meanwhile, a Washington Post reporter who interviewed de Becker says the investigator not only believes that the Enquirer’s coverage of Bezos was politically motivated but that the sexts may have been obtained by a “government entity.”
“Gavin de Becker told us that he does not believe that Jeff Bezos’ phone was hacked,” Manuel Roig-Franzia told MSNBC Thursday. “He thinks it’s possible that a government entity might have gotten hold of his text messages.”
AMI responded to Bezos’ post Friday, saying that it “fervently” believes it “acted lawfully” in its reporting but that its four-person board would “thoroughly investigate” his allegations.
Pecker sits on the board, alongside David R. Hughes, a former Trump casino executive.
Additional reporting by Amanda Woods