Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has his crack private security team investigating how the National Enquirer came to publish his creepy sexts from an affair with a TV anchor, the Daily Beast reported on Wednesday, with investigators increasingly focused on whether the motives for the leak were political.
According to the site, Bezos’ investigators—in a probe he’s personally paying for, outside of Amazon—are looking into the eyebrow-raising messages the tabloid published earlier this month, which included puzzling lines like “I love you, alive girl,” just after Bezos and his wife MacKenzie announced their divorce after 25 years of marriage.
Three people familiar with the investigation told the Daily Beast that investigators explored but ultimately dismissed theories that their phones were hacked or that Sanchez herself leaked the texts to spur along the Bezos’ divorce. Now they’re working on determining if the leak was “politically motivated,” per the site, which could explain why the Enquirer got the hot scoop. (The tabloid’s parent company American Media Inc. and Amazon both declined to comment to the Beast, and the investigation is reportedly ongoing.)
But wait—who do we know who has ties to the Enquirer’s leadership and a strong distaste for both Bezos and the Washington Post? Why, it’s no one other than Old Man Trump! As the site reported:
With Bezos’ sudden political lightning rod status in mind, investigators are eyeing individuals with ties to various figures in the president’s orbit, who might have also had access to Bezos’ or Sanchez’s phones.
[...]
The fact that the texts ended up at the Enquirer has fueled Bezos’ investigators’ suspicions that the leak was politically motivated. The tabloid’s chief executive, David Pecker, admitted last month to using the Enquirer to facilitate a hush money payment to one of Trump’s alleged mistresses during the final weeks of the 2016 campaign. Pecker is a longtime Trump friend and ally, and tone of his publication’s coverage—it labeled Bezos a “schmuck” in one story, for example—has struck investigators as even more venomous than typical Enquirer fare.
Trump, for his part, cheered on Bezos’ divorce and is personal friends with Enquirer chief David Pecker, who admitted to hush money payments to silence Trump’s alleged mistresses during his 2016 campaign.
Best of luck, alive boy Jeff Bezos. Looking for leakers by combing through the Trump administration doesn’t seem like a bad place to start.