Prosecutors are examining whether American Media violated its cooperation agreement after Bezos' blackmail accusations
After Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos claimed in an eye-popping Medium post that the National Enquirer tried to blackmail him, prosecutors are taking action.
Federal prosecutors are examining whether the National Enquirer's publisher, American Media Inc., violated a cooperation deal with this alleged attempt to blackmail the richest man in the world, Bloomberg and The Associated Press reported Friday.
AMI had previously signed a non-prosecution deal under which the company agreed to "commit no crimes whatsoever" for three years or else it would "be subject to prosecution for any federal criminal violation of which this office has knowledge," The New York Times reports. This came when the company was being investigated for campaign finance violations and said that it bought the silence of a woman alleging an affair with President Trump before he ran for office, doing so for political reasons. Trump denies the affair and says he didn't arrange the deal.
On Thursday, Bezos said that AMI had threatened to release embarrassing photos of him unless he ceased an investigation into how the company obtained his text messages. Now, prosecutors will be looking into whether AMI's alleged attempted blackmailing of Bezos was a criminal act, in which case they will have violated the agreement and could be prosecuted.