Hindsight is 2020, but as Judge Juan Merchan explained to Donald Trump’s defense team on Thursday: If you didn’t want a problematic alleged sexual encounter with your client openly discussed in a Manhattan courtroom, you shouldn’t have brought it up on the first day of trial by denying any such interaction ever took place. And when Stormy Daniels began testifying, recounting in excruciating detail her claimed hotel-room rendezvous with the former president, it was the defense counsel’s job to stand up and say what they believed was out of bounds, Merchan said.
“For the life of me,” Merchan said at the end of Thursday’s proceedings, per ABC News, “I don’t know why Ms. [Susan] Necheles didn’t object.”
