Michael Cohen Claims Trump Was Directly Involved in National Enquirer Attacks on His 2016 GOP Primary Rivals

Former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen spoke out to Rachel Maddow Tuesday night and talked about a range of subjects, including President Donald Trump’s infamous relationship with the National Enquirer.

Maddow noted that he claims in his book that Trump “personally approved that insane story in the National Enquirer” that said Ted Cruz’s dad was linked to the man who killed JFK.

“Do you know if Senator Cruz knows that Donald Trump approved that personally and made that happen personally?” she asked.

“He does now,” Cohen wryly responded.

Maddow asked Cohen if Trump was really getting the Enquirer “to run stories one after the other on all the Republican primary candidates.”

“As each candidate was moving up, let’s say Marco Rubio, David Pecker would reach out to me and he would give me a list of things that he was intending to do in order to squash Ted Cruz’s or Marco Rubio’s rise, whoever was rising in the poll, that’s who became the person that we needed to knock out of the race,” Cohen said. “With Marco Rubio, you may remember, there was photos of him in a swimming pool, that he had a drug problem, and a sorts of other… we’ll call them salacious rumors. And every time that they would be made — they would be provided to me by David Pecker, I would immediately take them into Mr. Trump’s office, we would sit down, we would talk about it, he would approve it and then I would contact David. Next thing you know, two days later on the front cover, ‘Marco Rubio has a drug problem.'”

Cohen also took a shot at “other stations right now that are doing the same thing, they’re becoming state-run television as well as newspapers that, you know, if Donald Trump sneezed, it’s the greatest sneeze in the history of the world.”

You can watch above, via MSNBC.