Trump lawyer Tacopina's failed mistrial bid was 'beginning of the blunders': ex-prosecutor

Donald Trump's attorney Joe Tacopina failed to successfully make his case on the first day of the civil trial into rape and defamation allegations against the former president, and the second day of cross-examination was even worse, according to a federal prosecutor.

Tacopina, who some legal experts say was already limited by Trump's refusal to personally testify, moved on Monday for a mistrial on the basis that the judge overseeing the case was violating Trump's rights by repeatedly ruling against him on the first day of cross-examination.

That motion was doomed to fail, and that was only the "beginning of the blunders," said Mitchell Epner, a former federal prosecutor who now practices at the NYC firm Rottenberg Lipman Rich P.C.

Epner, writing an opinion piece for The Daily Beast, said Tacopina did "precisely the opposite" of the best practices for successful cross-examinations. For one, according to Epner, one of the "central rules of cross-examination is to never reinforce the testimony that the witness provided during direct testimony."

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Tacopina, on the other hand, "spent minutes at a time giving Carroll the opportunity to repeat her direct testimony," according to Epner.

"When he then tried to debunk it, he rarely had anything of substance to convince the jury that she must have been lying," he wrote. "Rather, he repeatedly just tried to get Carroll to admit that her testimony was 'incredible' or 'extraordinary.'"

Epner added that Tacopina "also forgot the cardinal rule to never as a question where you don't know the answer." Tacopina "repeatedly asked questions where it was clear he had no idea what the answer would be," according to Epner.

Epner also said Tacopina had "lost control" of the courtroom in part by "playing an entire segment" of a CNN interview with his accuser, writer E. Jean Carroll.

"While the video was playing, Tacopina was literally reduced to being an observer," Epner wrote.