A veteran tabloid publisher testified Tuesday that he pledged to be Donald Trump’s “eyes and ears” during his 2016 presidential campaign, recounting how he promised the then-candidate that he would help suppress stories that had the potential to harm the Republican’s election bid.The testimony from David Pecker was designed to bolster prosecutors’ assertions of a decades-long friendship between Trump and the former publisher of the National Enquirer that culminated in an agreement to give the candidate a heads-up on negative tips and stories so they could be quashed.Pecker is the first witness in Trump’s historic hush money trial in Manhattan, where he faces 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in connection with payments meant to prevent harmful stories from surfacing during the final days of the 2016 campaign. The stories included a porn actor’s claims of an extramarital sexual encounter a decade earlier.The effort to suppress unflattering information was …
