Morning Joe rips Trump lawyers for sitting 'half-asleep' through Stormy Daniels testimony
MSNBC's Joe Scarborough ripped Donald Trump's lawyers for sitting "half-asleep" through Stormy Daniels' testimony before asking for a mistrial.
The adult film actress provided detailed testimony of her 2006 sexual encounter with the former president, whose lawyer paid her $130,000 a decade later to bury that story ahead of the 2016 election, and the "Morning Joe" host agreed with Judge Juan Merchan that Trump's attorneys should have lodged more objections to block some of those lurid details from reaching the jury's ears.
"You don't call for a mistrial after you're sitting there, maybe he was half-asleep with Donald Trump, while she is giving this testimony that, I don't know that you would call it graphic, but it went in to very personal details," Scarborough said. "As the judge said, it would have been better if nobody had heard inside that courtroom, but when somebody goes there, the judge stands up and -- or the defense stands up and they object, so that would have stopped the testimony. The defense didn't stand up and object along the way because the judge clearly thought – at one point told Stormy Daniels, 'Hey, too much information, okay? You just give us a general outline. We don't care what you two did.'"
"Again, the judge is exactly right," Scarborough added. "If the defense had a problem with it coming in, that is when you stand up and you object."
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Legal analyst Lisa Rubin found her testimony relevant and important, especially in light of testimony from other witnesses who've told the jury about the level of concern within the Trump campaign about how her story would land in the wake of the "Access Hollywood" tape in the closing days of October 2016.
"I have a slightly different take on all of this than I think some folks do," Rubin said. "I didn't think that the testimony was graphic at all. I actually thought that while she provided lots of details that were extraneous in the judge's mind at times or in team Trump's mind, they were the things like the color of the tile on the floor of his penthouse or the fact that his toiletries kit in the bathroom had Pert Plus and Old Spice in it. When it came to what actually transpired between them, she was fairly circumspect. She added one detail about the sexual encounter that I think the judge wished she hadn't, but when he said that at times she said too much, she said things that were better left unsaid, a lot of that had to do with her own state of mind and what she was experiencing at the time."
Prosecutors don't need the jury to believe Daniels is credible, Rubin said, but they want them to understand what the impact of her story would have been in the final days before the 2016 presidential election – which Trump has been charged with illegally trying to influence by paying off the porn actress and then trying to hide those payments by falsifying business records.
"What they want is the jury to understand what the impact of her story would have been had Michael Cohen never, in the final days of the campaign, rushed to reach a settlement with her," Rubin said. "In other words, in a 'but for' universe and [Daniels attorney] Keith Davidson to represent her and get to what was signed and paid in the last days of October, what would have happened? What would the impact have been on the campaign, a campaign that was already reeling from the 'Access Hollywood' allegations and the things that followed in those ensuing days, including a number of other women, beyond Karen McDougal and Stormy Daniels coming forward to the New York Times on Oct. 10 saying they were sexually assaulted by Donald Trump. That is what they want the jury to hear, what would that have sounded like, and can you understand then why Donald Trump and Michael Cohen were ultimately motivated to want her to say nothing, given what that story would have sounded like?"
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