Flashback: Jeremiah Wright claimed Obama pal offered $150K hush money

Candidate asked anti-American pastor to stop preaching

Published: 21 hours ago

As Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation appears to zero in on Trump lawyer Michael Cohen’s payments to two women during the 2016 campaign, the claim of a similar “hush money” offer to Barack Obama’s former pastor is being recalled.

Chicago pastor Jeremiah Wright, who married Barack and Michelle Obama and was described by the former president as a mentor, revealed in a 2012 interview with the New York Post highlighted Friday by the Gateway Pundit that one of Obama’s “closest friends” offered him $150,000 if he would not preach until after the 2008 November election.

Former President Barack Obama delivers the Nelson Mandela lecture in Johannesburg, South Africa, July 17, 2018.

Former President Barack Obama delivers the Nelson Mandela lecture in Johannesburg, South Africa, July 17, 2018.

The airing of excerpts of Wright’s virulent anti-America, anti-Semitic and racist sermons became a major issue, threatening the Obama campaign’s effort to bury or spin the candidate’s far-left upbringing and political activism.

“After the media went ballistic on me, I received an email offering me money not to preach at all until the November presidential election,” Wright said in the interview.

The pastor affirmed that Obama came to see him during the election campaign and asked him to stop public speaking.

“Barack said he wanted to meet me in secret, in a secure place,” Wright said. “And I said, ‘You’re used to coming to my home, you’ve been here countless times, so what’s wrong with coming to my home?'”

They met in the parsonage of Wright’s church, Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago.

“And one of the first things Barack said was, ‘I really wish you wouldn’t do any more public speaking until after the November election,'” Wright said.

Obama, the minister recalled, said it’s “gonna hurt the campaign if you do that.”

In a January 2006 sermon, Wright – who espouses the neo-Marxist black liberation theology – called America the “No. 1 killer in the world” and blamed the country for launching the AIDS virus to maintain affluence at the expense of the Third World. The pastor said in a sermon just after 9/11, “The government lied about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color.” In a 2003 sermon, Wright encouraged blacks to “damn America” in God’s name and blamed the U.S. for provoking the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks by dropping nuclear weapons on Japan in World War II and supporting Israel since 1947.

Then-Democratic Party primary rival Hillary Clinton seized on the controversy, saying in an interview with the editorial board of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review in March 2008, “You don’t choose your family, but you choose what church you want to attend.” At a press conference later that day, Clinton said, “I think given all we have heard and seen, [Wright] would not have been my pastor.”

Trump is in the crosshairs of the special counsel probe not only for alleged campaign collusion with Russia but also for the roles he and former personal lawyer Cohen played in a payment of $130,000 to a porn star and $150,000 to a former Playboy Playmate. The women claim Trump had a sexual relationship with them in 2006.

Cohen’s lawyer, longtime Clinton advocate Lanny Davis, claims the payments are criminal campaign violations. Liberal Harvard Professor Alan Dershowitz has rebutted Davis’ claims in interviews this week, insisting there are other interests, aside from winning an election, that could be cited as motivations, such as family concerns.

https://www.wnd.com/2018/08/flashback-jeremiah-wright-claimed-obama-pal-offered-150k-hush-money/?cat_orig=politics

Now isn't this interesting again…

>>2732945

Yep, this is a good man.

I think Pecker is part of the plan.

Pecker Gets Protection

https://www.weeklystandard.com/andrew-egger/national-enquirer-publisher-pecker-gets-immunity-from-feds

Chairman of AMI, which publishes the National Enquirer, is cooperating with the feds against Michael Cohen.

Throughout this whole remarkable week, in which we’ve seen one former Trump senior staffer convicted of bank fraud and his personal lawyer swear under oath that Trump directed him to commit a federal crime, the president’s faithful backers have kept up a predictable drumbeat: There’s nothing new to see here. Nothing has changed. There’s still no collusion. It’s the same old witch hunt, and this will pass away quietly like everything else.

So why are so many former members of Trump’s inner circle scurrying for the exits like rats deserting a ship?

Thursday brought one of the biggest desertions yet, with the Wall Street Journal reporting that American Media Inc. Chairman David Pecker was cooperating with prosecutors in the federal case against Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen. “In exchange for immunity,” the Journal reports, Pecker “has met with prosecutors and shared details about payments Mr. Cohen arranged in an effort to silence two women who alleged sexual encounters with Mr. Trump, including Mr. Trump’s knowledge of the deals.”

Pecker, whose company publishes the National Enquirer, was a rock-solid ally to Trump throughout the 2016 campaign and the first year of the Trump presidency. With Pecker at the helm, the Enquirer has regularly savaged Trump’s political opponents—who can forget the stories painting Ted Cruz as a serial womanizer and his father as an accomplice to Lee Harvey Oswald?—and propped up many of Trump’s own wilder accusations, such as the notion that Obama had Trump Tower wiretapped during the campaign.

And the Enquirer didn’t stop at publishing reliably pro-Trump content. As was reported earlier this year, the Enquirer went so far as to help bury stories that might have reflected badly on the president by buying the rights to publish them, then killing them instead. This most notably occurred with former Playboy playmate Karen McDougal, who claims to have had an affair with Trump in 2006. Pecker paid McDougal $150,000 for the rights to the story, then sat on it until it was leaked to the Wall Street Journal in November 2016. Prosecutors in the Cohen case further allege that Pecker helped Trump hunt down these damaging stories, saying he helped “deal with negative stories about [Trump’s] relationships with women by, among other things, assisting the campaign in identifying such stories so they could be purchased and their publication avoided.”

There’s more! Pecker has for decades also been one of the president’s personal friends, a guest on his private planes and a fixture at his Mar-a-Lago resort. In 2013, Trump praised him several times on Twitter, saying he would be a “brilliant choice” to become CEO of Time magazine—“Nobody could bring it back like David!”

And now he’s flipped, helping federal prosecutors in New York bring charges against fellow flipper Cohen—who says he and Pecker worked to keep women with whom Trump allegedly had affairs quiet “at the request of the candidate.” For Cohen, this was a violation of election law. For Pecker—well, he got immunity from something.