The NFL is a crazy place.
A major bombshell news report was dropped on Wednesday regarding the New England Patriots, Donald Trump and former United States Senator Arlen Spector.
According to Seth Wickersham and Don Van Natta, Jr. of ESPN, former President Donald Trump helped the New England Patriots stop the entire probe into the Spygate scandal.
Via the report:
“But there was one man, a mutual friend of Specter and Patriots owner Robert Kraft, who believed that he could make the investigation go away. He was a famous businessman and reality television star who routinely threw money at politicians to try to curry favor, whether it worked or not. He had been a generous political patron of Specter’s for two decades.
One day in early 2008, Specter had dinner with the man in Palm Beach at his palatial club, not far from Kraft’s Florida home. A phone call followed. The friend offered Specter what the senator felt was tantamount to a bribe: “If you laid off the Patriots, there’d be a lot of money in Palm Beach.”
The late Arlen Specter, a long-time Pennsylvania senator, aggressively pursued the matter as he was just as outraged as the majority of NFL fans around the country. He wanted to get to the bottom of the signal-stealing-and-possibly-other-forms-of-cheating rabbit hole, especially since the Patriots had beaten the Eagles in Super Bowl XXXIX. Specter loudly rattled the sword regarding the NFL’s broadcast antitrust exemption, which allows 32 teams to sell TV rights collectively not through the individual businesses that make up the league.
Charles Robbins, Specter’s trusted longtime communications aide and the ghostwriter of two Specter memoirs revealed that the man “who dangled campaign cash if Specter were to drop the Spygate inquiry was none other than Donald J. Trump.”
“With Robbins now on the record that he believed Specter’s “mutual friend” who had offered him money in Palm Beach was Trump, an ESPN reporter reached out again to Shanin Specter, Arlen’s son. In October 2017, Shanin Specter and the reporter had discussed a few people who could have made the call to his father. He says he left the conversation under the impression he had pointed to Trump as the person. But now, he’s far more definitive: “It was Trump.”
“My father told me that Trump was acting as a messenger for Kraft,” Shanin Specter says. “But I’m equally sure the reference to money in Palm Beach was campaign contributions, not cash. The offer was Kraft assistance with campaign contributions. … My father said it was Kraft’s offer, not someone else’s.”
“He was pissed,” Shanin Specter says about his father. “He told me about the call in the wake of the conversation and his anger about it. … My father was upset when [such overtures] would happen because he felt as if it were tantamount to a bribe solicitation, though the case law on this subject says it isn’t. … He would tell me these things when they occurred. We were very close.”
Jason Miller, a senior adviser to Trump, told ESPN.com that the claim from Shanin Specter is “completely false.” A Patriots spokesman told ESPN.com that Robert Kraft “never asked” Trump to speak to Arlen Specter on Kraft’s behalf, and that Kraft “is not aware of any involvement of Trump on this topic and he did not have any other engagement with Specter or his staff.”
