Embarrassing stories, and who pays? Trump trial key takeaways, day seven

David Pecker testified about his role in buying a story from the model Karen McDougal about an alleged affair with Trump

• Pecker says he bought story so it did not harm campaign

David Pecker spent all day on the witness stand on Thursday in the Manhattan criminal trial against Donald Trump.

Pecker, the longtime head of America Media, which owns the National Enquirer tabloid, is a key witness because he was intimately involved in the practice of buying the rights to potentially damaging stories about Trump and then never publishing them, a practice known as “catch and kill”. The central allegation in the case is that Trump used catch and kill to prevent Stormy Daniels from going public about an alleged affair with him in 2016, when he was running for president, and then falsified business records to conceal it.