The trial was pretty banal this morning, even though important:
How do you prove a defendant caused others to make false business records where those with direct knowledge of his intent and involvement are limited to the defendant, a man now in jail for perjury, and Michael Cohen?
You surround Michael Cohen’s expected testimony with a mountain of circumstantial evidence, an already substantial pile to which prosecutors just added excerpts from Trump’s books How to Get Rich and Think Like a Billionaire.
Those excerpts reveal Trump as a micromanager who advised never taking one’s eyes off his checkbook, advertised he negotiated the price of everything “down to the paper clips,” trusted Weisselberg wholly, and boasted that he even loved signing checks.
And best of all for the prosecutors? They are Trump’s own easy-to-digest, New York Times-bestselling words, perhaps amplified or made snappier by his ghostwriter, Meredith McIver, but nonetheless his.
He has said many times that he liked to sign checks because that was how he kept tabs on what was being spent. Apparently, he kept doing it while he was in the White House.
And then they called Stormy. Hoo boy:
Within 15 minutes of her testimony beginning, Daniels had guided the jury to the hotel suite in Lake Tahoe where she has said she and Trump had sex. “Does Mr. Hefner know you stole his pajamas?” she recalled asking Trump after seeing his silk sleepwear. He peppered her with questions, she said, about her job—about unions, residuals, and STD testing—which she thought was “very cool.” But he kept cutting her off, and she asked him, “Are you always this rude?”
Daniels said she had come to the suite for dinner and didn’t realize that Trump intended to sleep with her. It concerned her that he didn’t wear a condom, she testified, but she didn’t mention it, because “I didn’t say anything at all.” She testified that it was dark out by the time she left the suite, and her hands were shaking as she tried to put her gold, strappy heels on. Daniels has always said the sex was consensual but awkward and, for her part, reluctant. When she was asked on the stand why she didn’t say no to Trump, she repeated, “I didn’t say anything at all.”
At the defense table, Trump stared straight ahead.
The trial, in these first few weeks, has flitted between the dry details of financial records and the intrigue surrounding a historic sex scandal. Before Daniels testified, with the pendulum set to swing back toward her side of the matter, Trump’s attorney Susan Necheles argued to the judge that “this case is a case about books and records” and sought to limit the details of the alleged tryst that would be admissible.
Merchan seemed to understand. “We don’t need to know the details of the intercourse,” he said. After Daniels began testifying, he seemed frustrated when she went beyond the confines of the questions asked of her, reminding her a few times not to elaborate unprompted. The condom detail, for instance, was one that led Trump’s lawyers to call for a mistrial, a request that Merchan did not grant.
They were also upset that Daniels had told the story that she was threatened in a parking lot saying that it was prejudicial. The judge said he was surprised they didn’t object at the time and that he would have the jury disregard it. Hookay.
Necheles was tough on Daniels, painting her as a liar and extortionist. Having been warned by the prosecution to keep her answers short, she denied it all. A taste:
During a fiery cross-examination in the New York hush-money trial, porn star Stormy Daniels fought back against a defense lawyer’s accusations that she has a vendetta against Donald Trump.
“Am I correct that you hate President Trump?” defense lawyer Susan Necheles demanded early in Tuesday afternoon’s questioning.
Daniels looked directly at Necheles, her voice crisp as she answered.
“Correct,” Daniels said.
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“And you want him to go to jail?” Necheles pursued.
“If he’s found guilty, yes,” Daniels snapped back.
The tense exchange came after nearly four hours of direct testimony, in which Daniels described the one-night-stand she says she had with the then-Apprentice star in 2006.
Necheles raised her voice as she confronted Daniels with a tweet in which Daniels called Trump an “orange turd”— and about a nearly half-billion dollars in legal fees she owes after unsuccessfully suing Trump for defamation.
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“You didn’t take any money out of your pocket to pay President Trump did you?” the lawyer asked, referring to more than $500,000 in legal fees Daniels owes Trump after losing the federal court case.
“You’re choosing not to pay President Trump?” the lawyer demanded. “You have said publicly you’re not going to pay President Trump?”
Daniels was asked about her tweets from 2022, in which the porn star said she’d go to jail before paying Trump. In one tweet, Daniels had vowed, “I’ll never give that orange turd a dime.”
“You call him names all the time!” Necheles shouted, in what was more an accusation than a question.
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“Yes,” Daniels answered quickly. “Because he made fun of me first.”
“So one of you started it, but you continue it?” Necheles asked, her voice still loud.
“Correct,” Daniels answered defiantly.
At another point, Necheles accused Daniels of cashing in on a false “claim” of sex.
“You’ve been making money by claiming you had sex with Mr. Trump for more than a decade, right?” the lawyer asked.
“I’ve been making money by telling my story about what happened to me,” Daniels answered.
“And that story has made you a lot of money, right?” Necheles demanded.
“It has also cost me a lot of money,” Daniels answered.
There was more of this and it will continue on Thursday. What a day.
I think the prosecution elicited all this detail about the sexual encounter as a way to build Daniels’ credibility when the defense tries to say that she made the whole thing up to extort poor innocent Donald Trump who would never have done such a thing. (That seems to be his position anyway.) But there’s been so much testimony about how concerned they were about the women coming forward during the campaign (and McDougal may yet take the stand as well) that his protestations aren’t going to hold much water on that. And Stormy had a lot of details, even saying that she kept her bra on and they were in “missionary” and she was staring at the ceiling asking herself how she had so misread the situation. Those details are important.
He also said she reminded him of his daughter. Oy vey.
Anyway, there’s more to come and the prosecutors will be able to redirect. Stormy could be on the stand for the rest of the week.
Several members of the general public who on Tuesday attended one of the most intense days of testimony in Donald J. Trump’s trial described the proceedings as riveting, and said they found the star witness, Stormy Daniels, to be credible.
“Just an authentic individual,” Hamilton Clancy, 61, an actor who lives on the Upper West Side, said on Tuesday about Ms. Daniels. He was among the people who lined up early for a coveted seat in the courtroom, which was otherwise packed with journalists.
Mr. Clancy said that in addition to Ms. Daniels’s believability, he was surprised and impressed with Justice Juan M. Merchan’s calm demeanor.
“He was so low-key, so even-keeled,” Mr. Clancy said. “You see how fair the guy is.”
Mr. Clancy and his spouse, Karen Kitz-Clancy, arrived in line at 5:20 a.m. for their seats in the overflow courtroom. It is Ms. Kitz-Clancy‘s 63rd birthday, and this is how she wanted to spend it.
“It was absolutely thrilling,” she said. “We were in the room where it happens.”
Also in the overflow room was Seth Slade, 59, a paralegal who lives in Woodside, Queens.
“I thought she’s a compelling witness,” he said of Ms. Daniels. “It seemed like the judge wanted to move it along.”
