Rebecca Ruiz

Apparently, the tabloid executive David J. Pecker has been granted immunity by federal prosecutors investigating payments during the 2016 campaign to two women who said they had affairs with Donald J. Trump. Pecker is chief executive and chairman of American Media Inc., the nation’s biggest tabloid news publisher, best known for its flagship, The National Enquirer. He is close to President Trump and the president’s former lawyer and fixer, Michael D.

The Justice Department appointed Robert Mueller III, a former FBI director, as special counsel to oversee the investigation into ties between President Trump’s campaign and Russian officials, dramatically raising the legal and political stakes in an affair that has threatened to engulf Trump’s four-month-old presidency.

The decision by the deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, came after a cascade of damaging developments for President Trump in recent days, including his abrupt dismissal of FBI Director James Comey and the subsequent disclosure that President Trump asked Comey to drop the investigation of his former national security adviser, Michael Flynn. Rosenstein had been under escalating pressure from Democrats, and even some Republicans, to appoint a special counsel after he wrote a memo that the White House initially cited as the rationale for Comey’s dismissal. By appointing Mueller, a former federal prosecutor with an unblemished reputation, Rosenstein could alleviate uncertainty about the government’s ability to investigate the questions surrounding the Trump campaign and the Russians. Rosenstein said that he concluded that “it is in the public interest for me to exercise my authorities and appoint a special counsel to assume responsibility for this matter.”