The following article by Lachlan Cartwright was posted on the Daily Beast website May 28, 2018:
The president and the king of gossip have a relationship that’s paid off for them both. Never more so than when Trump almost lost the election.
When the Access Hollywood tape of Donald Trump emerged in the home stretch of the 2016 election, it should have been a gift from the tabloid gods for TMZ.
Instead, the celebrity gossip website went into overdrive to help Trump.
Within a week of the tape’s explosion, TMZ ran “exclusive” after “exclusive” giving Trump cover. There was a story that Bill Clinton made “disparaging remarks” about women when he played golf with Trump—as Trump claimed Clinton did when the tape dropped. Another story claimed NBC executives “had a plan to time the release” of the tape to sink Trump. There was also an item from a former Miss Teen USA saying she never had a bad experience with Trump after he was accused of leering at nude girls backstage.
It shouldn’t have been a surprise: It was the result of a cozy relationship between TMZ founder and boss Harvey Levin and Trump, who called each other throughout the campaign, seven sources told The Daily Beast.
“Leading up to the election there were many phone calls between Harvey and Trump. Harvey was in close contact with the Trump team frequently,” said a former TMZ top executive who, like others, spoke under the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution from Levin.
“There was a point Harvey would make jokes in the newsroom that he would be press secretary or in the Cabinet but we got the impression he was only half joking,” another former staffer, who had daily dealings with Levin, said.
Unusually, Levin got personally involved in the story of one of the many women who accused Trump of sexual assault, according to two TMZ sources.