Got dirt? Porn publisher Larry Flynt offers up to US$10 million for ‘smoking gun’ on Trump
In full-page newspaper ad, Flynt asks for any information that is fit to publish and drives Trump from office
Pornography publisher Larry Flynt is offering “up to US$10 million” to anyone who produces information that leads to US President Donald Trump’s impeachment and removal from office.
He lays out the offer in a full-page ad in the Sunday edition of The Washington Post.
During last year’s presidential campaign, Flynt dangled US$1 million to anyone who could turn over video or audio capturing Trump behaving in an illegal or sexually demeaning manner.
That followed the release of the 2005 Access Hollywood video in which Trump bragged of imposing himself on women.
Flynt, best known as the publisher of the pornographic magazine Hustler, outlined numerous reasons he felt Trump needed to be removed from office, charging him with everything from “compromising domestic and foreign policy with his massive conflicts-of-interest global business empire” to “telling hundreds of bald-faced lies” to “gross nepotism and appointment of unqualified persons to high office.”
That was why, Flynt wrote, he was seeking information from anyone who could provide a “smoking gun” – perhaps buried in Trump’s tax returns or in some other investment records – that would lead to his impeachment.
“Did he make some financial quid pro quo with the Russians?” the ad stated.
“Has the business of the United States been compromised to protect the business of the Trump empire? We need to flush everything out into the open.”
At the end of the ad, there is a toll-free number and an email address, along with a reassurance that Flynt fully intends to pay the full sum of US$10 million for good information.
“Impeachment would be a messy, contentious affair, but the alternative – three more years of destabilising dysfunction – is worse,” Flynt wrote. “I feel it is my patriotic duty, and the duty of all Americans, to dump Trump before it’s too late.”
Kris Coratti, a spokeswoman for The Washington Post, declined to say how much a full-page ad costs or how far in advance one would have to notify the newspaper to run such an ad in a Sunday edition.
“We give advertisers wide latitude to have their say,” Coratti said.
“Generally, if the ads are not illegal or advocating illegal actions, we try not to place limits on speech or content.”
The White House didn’t comment.
It’s not the first time Flynt, who endorsed Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in last year’s presidential race, has offered a monetary reward with the aim of taking down a politician.
In 2007, he offered US$1 million, also through a full-page ad in The Washington Post, seeking evidence from anyone who had an illicit sexual encounter with a member of Congress or other government official.
He had done the same in 1998, and the information that emerged reportedly influenced the resignation of Republican Congressman Bob Livingston, who was in line to be speaker of the House.
In 2012, Flynt again dangled a US$1 million reward in public, this time for then-Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s tax returns.
Associated Press, The Washington Post
