Trump goes face-to-face with testimony he’s denied for years

Analysis by Stephen Collinson, CNN

(CNN) — “The People Call Stormy Daniels.”

It was the moment that Donald Trump’s hush money trial — bogged down in recent days in dreary testimony about accounting — roared back to life on Tuesday.

A former president — who could find himself back behind the Oval Office desk in January — came face-to-face for the first time in years with the adult film star whom he’s accused of silencing with a hush money payment.

What came next was tawdry, compelling, and achingly embarrassing to Trump, who was forced to sit scowling as Daniels painted a detailed scene of a black-tiled hotel suite that allegedly hosted a liaison that the ex-president still denies.

It was the latest unfathomable lurch of an election campaign like no other. And for a normal candidate who lacked Trump’s Teflon political hide, it would probably be the end of the road.

But as so often happens, one devastating legal blow to the ex-president was followed by a silver lining. He learned late Tuesday afternoon that Judge Aileen Cannon, whom he appointed, indefinitely postponed a trial in his classified documents case in Florida. This means Trump almost certainly won’t face a jury on federal charges of mishandling classified information before the election — a reality that prompted his former White House counsel Ty Cobb to accuse Cannon of slow walking the case, indulging frivolous motions and misunderstanding applicable law. “This is a case of bias and incompetence,” Cobb told CNN’s Erin Burnett.

Cannon’s move comes with Trump’s two election interference cases, both of which have become swamped by his pre-trial delaying tactics and fulsome appeals, also unlikely to go on trial before voters make their fateful choice in November. The Georgia Court of Appeals said Wednesday it will consider an effort by Trump and his co-defendants to disqualify District Attorney Fani Willis from the 2020 election subversion case – another sign that pre-trial efforts to delay a trial are succeeding.

So, while the hush money case is widely regarded as the weakest of the bunch facing Trump, it’s likely the only one that could create the never-before-seen scenario of a convicted felon asking voters to elect him president.

That made the testimony of Daniels even more critical. And the most important question after her first bruising three-and-three-quarters hours on the stand is whether her salaciousness testimony made a guilty verdict more likely — or ended up undermining the case.

Furthermore, will the risqué nature of her description of her relationship with Trump break through in a way that previous unflattering revelations of the ex-president’s character have failed to do and shift any critical swing state votes in November?

Daniels reveals new details about alleged liaison with Trump nearly two decades ago

Daniels, along with former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, is one of two star witnesses in the first-ever criminal trial of a former US president. She told the jury Tuesday about a $130,000 hush money payment she received from Cohen before the 2016 election. Such payments are not illegal. But prosecutors allege Trump falsified business records to hide it and to mislead voters in an early bout of election interference. He’s pleaded not guilty.

“Stormy gave new information about her brief liaison with Donald Trump and additional information about many of the key elements in the case,” legal analyst Norm Eisen told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. “It was one of the biggest days yet in this very eventful trial.”

The drama was even greater than it first appeared.

A transcript of the day’s proceedings revealed an exchange between Judge Juan Merchan and Trump’s attorney that had not been audible in court. The judge complained that the ex-president was “cursing audibly” during Daniels’ testimony and was shaking his head. “It has the potential to intimidate the witness and the jury can see that.” The judge told the lawyer, Todd Blanche, that he spoke to him at the bench to avoid embarrassing the defendant but that the behavior needed to stop. CNN’s Jeremy Herb, who was in court, reported that Trump was more engaged on Tuesday than at any previous moment in the trial.

Trump was already on thin ice with the judge a day after Merchan warned he could face jail if he continued violating a gag order intended to protect jurors and witnesses. He did manage to avoid crossing the line while speaking to reporters in a courtroom corridor at the end of the day. But the blush-inducing testimony from Daniels may provide the most arduous test yet of his shaky self-discipline and bring the possibility of a new gag order showdown with Merchan closer.

It’s impossible to know how jurors will interpret individual chapters of a trial.

But with the level of detail that Daniels provided about her time with Trump, including his “silk or satin” pajamas, she appeared to seriously undermine his denials that they had a relationship. That could be critical to explaining to jurors why Trump was so keen to allegedly cover it up.

But Trump’s attorney Susan Necheles was able to get Daniels to admit her antipathy for Trump and that she wanted to see him held to account. This admission could potentially cast doubt on her motives.

It only takes one juror to thwart a conviction. And in an aggressive cross-examination that will resume on Thursday, Necheles sought to create reasonable doubt and to disqualify Daniels as a believable witness. “Am I correct that you hate President Trump?” Necheles asked. Daniels replied, “Yes.” The former adult film star was then asked if she wanted the former president to go to jail. “I want him to be held accountable,” she replied.

A surreal day of testimony

As Trump tries to win back the White House in November, weighed down by four criminal indictments, an adverse civil fraud trial judgment worth half a billion dollars, the stigma of two impeachments and the memory of his assault on democracy after the 2020 election, the alleged facts of the case as aired on Tuesday felt well short of the hammer blows of history.

For one thing, it all happened so long ago. The episode in question dates back to 2006 when Trump and Daniels were together in a hotel room at a celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe when the future president was in the early flush of his success as a reality star.

Daniels said that after returning from the bathroom she was shocked to see Trump on the bed in a T-shirt and boxers. She testified she took off her clothes and they had sex in the missionary position. “I was staring at the ceiling. I didn’t know how I got there,” Daniels said. “I had on tiny little … strappy gold heels with little tiny buckles. My hands were shaking so hard. I was having a hard time getting dressed. He said, ‘Oh, great. Let’s get together again honey bunch. We were great together.’ I just wanted to leave.”

Neither Trump nor Daniels could ever have envisioned nearly two decades ago the improbable path that they would both take — to the moment when the alleged bedroom secrets of a once-and-possibly future president would transfix a courtroom in the middle of the 2020s.

While the span of the alleged interactions between Trump and Daniels — and later attempts to cover them up — are not necessarily important to how the case is decided, they could be more significant in public perceptions about the trial. This appeared to occur to Trump’s second son, Eric Trump, who was in court Tuesday and posted on X, trying out a new Trump campaign attack line. “Perspective: Sitting front row attempting to figure out how any of this garbage from 20 years ago relates to ‘legal’ bills submitted by a long time personal attorney being booked as a ‘legal’ expense,” he wrote.

As always, Donald Trump tried to put his own spin on events.

“This was a very big day. A very revealing day, as you see, their case is totally falling apart,” Trump claimed after watching his attorney seek to dismantle Daniels’ story piece by piece. “They have nothing on books and records.” The former president is likely wildly over optimistic on that point since Daniels is mostly important to prosecutors in establishing the backstory of why the alleged cover-up took place and she does not have first-hand knowledge about the alleged bookkeeping transgressions.

Still, following Daniels’ lurid account, the ex-president’s team moved for a mistrial on the grounds that unnecessary detail about the liaison could prejudice the jury against their client. Merchan denied the request but did admit that some of the most explicit content was “best left unsaid.”

That is a sentiment with which many Americans might concur.

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