On the docket: delay, delay, delay
As Donald Trump’s hush-money trial got rolling once again in New York on Thursday with more testimony from Stormy Daniels, it appeared likelier than ever that this might be the only time he faces a jury for alleged criminal acts before the election.
In the past 48 hours, courts have granted significant delays in two of the former president’s other pending criminal cases.
The first, which we covered on Tuesday, was Florida judge Aileen Cannon’s move to formally cancel the trial date for Trump’s criminal classified documents case and indefinitely delay the proceedings, while laying out a very slow-paced hearing calendar for specific pretrial motions.
Cannon, who was appointed to the federal bench by Trump, has repeatedly taken dilatory steps that have slowed the case down. It’s now all but guaranteed that this trial won’t happen before election day.
On Thursday, Trump got more good news when a Georgia court of appeals announced it would hear Trump’s appeal seeking to have Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis removed from leading the state election interference case. That creates a further delay in a process that has already been very drawn out and likely pushes that trial well past the November election.
And that’s not to mention what should arguably be Trump’s biggest trial. His federal criminal case has been put on ice while the US supreme court debates whether to grant him presidential immunity from prosecution. Their mere decision to consider the matter has already put the case’s timing at risk, and in oral arguments the court’s conservative majority indicated they might side at least partially with Trump and force a lower court to go back and reconsider the scope of the case, which could doom its chances of going to trial before he potentially wins re-election and can pardon himself.
Guardian US reporter Sam Levine explains how Trump’s legal delay strategy is working for the president in this piece.
The one place where this delay strategy isn’t working very well is in his ongoing New York hush-money case. Trump’s lawyers failed over and over to get the trial derailed. They once again tried to get Judge Juan Merchan to declare a mistrial on Thursday. He let the jury go a half-hour early so he could hear their arguments – and then rejected them, denying their motion for a mistrial.
Trump attorney Todd Blanche argued that Daniels had basically blown “a dog whistle for rape” in her description of her sexual encounter with Trump. Merchan said that he couldn’t figure out “for the life of me” why Trump’s attorney didn’t object to a question about whether Trump used a condom in the encounter, putting the onus on the defense for letting some of the more lurid details get into the testimony and arguing the story was fair game since they’d argued in their opening statements that Trump hadn’t had sex with Daniels.
Merchan also refused to grant Trump’s lawyer’s request for the gag order to be lifted so Trump could respond to Daniels and push back on her testimony.
Sidebar: What happened at today’s trial
Daniels returned to the stand this morning, with Trump attorney Susan Necheles doing everything she could to paint Daniels as a money-grubbing liar looking to cash in on a made-up story of an affair.
Necheles asked Daniels why she sought a payoff for her story rather than just going public in the waning days of the 2016 campaign, pointing out that Daniels had been talking to Slate but decided not to give them the story because she wasn’t going to get paid. “You wanted money, right?” Necheles asked her. Daniels insisted: “I wanted the truth to come out,” then added: “I never asked for money from anyone in particular, I asked for money to tell my story.”
Necheles also pointed out various ways Daniels’ story has shifted over the years, including that Daniels testified Tuesday that she didn’t eat dinner with Trump in his hotel room, but told InTouch magazine in 2011 that they’d ordered food. “You’re trying to make it say that it changed but it hasn’t changed,” Daniels fired back.
After Daniels finished testifying, there was a quick respite in the form of dry testimony from Trump Organization bookkeeper Rebecca Manochio, who was there to corroborate the paper trail. She described shipping checks from New York to Washington for the president to personally sign to repay his fixer and attorney Michael Cohen for the Daniels hush-money payoff. Former HarperCollins employee Tracy Menzies also testified briefly about one of Trump’s books in which he writes about getting revenge and the importance of loyalty.
Then came another bigger-name witness: former White House staffer and Trump’s personal Oval Office gatekeeper Madeleine Westerhout. She testified that Trump was a careful reader, and would call Trump Organization chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg if he had questions about the checks he was signing at the White House – an important point that establishes Trump was paying attention to the money he was spending even after becoming president. She broke down in tears when describing how she was fired from the White House after speaking at an off-the-record dinner with journalists. She’s due to return to the stand on Friday morning.
After trial, Trump attorney Todd Blanche said that prosecutors had decided not to call former Playboy model Karen McDougal to the stand after all.
