The New York judge in Trump's second defamation case involving E. Jean Carroll permitted only a "little bit" of sneakiness by Alina Habba before she was shut down, a legal expert said Thursday.
That's all according to former federal prosecutor Harry Litman whose "Talking Feds" series on YouTube attempted to decipher the cryptic three minutes of what he called "nontestimony testimony" by former President Donald Trump on Thursday in Manhattan federal court. Litman said that performance will send the jury to "scratch" their heads.
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The ground rules were established by no-mess Judge Lewis Kaplan, whom Litman called both "effective and hard."
Trump tried to get some runway and present to jurors "his intent" but that wasn't going to happen because, as Litman put it, the trial would instantly "turn into a circus."
Carroll, 80, accused Trump, 77, of sullying her name after she published an account of being sexually assaulted back in the 1990s inside the dressing room of the luxury clothing store Bergdorf Goodman.
“I never met the woman. I don’t know who the woman is. I wasn’t at the trial,” Trump lobbed from his seat at the defense table.
When it came time for Trump to take the stand, Kaplan made clear he "wasn’t allowed to interrupt the proceedings."
So Litman thinks Habba was forced into a tricky spot to dance around the agreed parameters.
"She puts him on," Litman said. "She's being a little sneaky. Maybe because Trump wants her to. Maybe not fully understanding — but she probably does.
"Maybe wants to take the chance, pushes on it a little bit more."
Whatever it was, Kaplan put the kibosh on the theatrics.
"And she gets shut down immediately," he said.
At one point when he wasn't answering "yes" or "no," Trump squeezed in two sentences.
“She said something that I considered to be a false accusation,” he said, later adding, “I just wanted to defend myself, my family and, frankly, the presidency.”
Kaplan informed the deciders to "disregard" those statements.
How much did it sway the jury?
Litman suspects very little, saying "I think the jury mainly will scratch its head with this three minutes of theater piece. I don't think it will impress them very much."
