The judge in former President Donald Trump’s hush money trial rejected a mistrial Tuesday after porn star Stormy Daniels offered an explicit version of a sexual encounter with Trump that he has said never happened.
Trump attorney Todd Blanche said Daniels’ claim that there was an “imbalance of power” at the time of the alleged encounter could unfairly “inflame the jury,” according to the New York Post.
“It’s extremely prejudicial to insert safety concerns in a trial about business records,” he said.
“The issue is she has testified today about consent, about danger — that’s not the point of this case. That’s not the point of her testimony,” he said. “How can you unring that bell?”
“The material that came in was not relevant to this criminal case at all. And I think it shows that she was trying to ‘get Trump.’ I actually thought there was a motive there.”
—Former Federal judge to CNN on Stormy Daniels’ testimony in the NY Trump Trial pic.twitter.com/SLC46mNpja
— ALX 🇺🇸 (@alx) May 8, 2024
Judge Juan Merchan rejected a bid for a mistrial but commented “that there are some things that would have been better left unsaid.”
He then threw a prop to the prosecution, noting, “I believe that the witness was very difficult to control.”
And he also blamed the defense, saying, “I was surprised there were not more objections to this testimony.”
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During her testimony, Merchan advised prosecutors, “The degree of detail that we’re going into here is just unnecessary.”
At one point, he told Daniels, “Please keep the answers short, just listen to the question, and answer the question.”
Perspective: Sitting front row attempting to figure out how any of this garbage from 20 years ago relates to “legal” bills submitted by a long time personal attorney being booked as a “legal” expense — but I digress. To be clear, they don’t give a s**t about the merits of this…
— Eric Trump (@EricTrump) May 7, 2024
In an Op-Ed for the New York Post, legal scholar Jonathan Turley said Merchan was quite happy to allow Daniels to humiliate Trump.
“He allowed the prosecutors to get into the details of the affair despite the immateriality of the evidence to any criminal theory,” he wrote, adding, “It is also uncontested that Trump wanted to pay to get the story (and other stories, including untrue allegations) from being published.”
“The value of the testimony was entirely sensational and gratuitous, yet Merchan was fine with humiliating Trump. Daniels’ testimony was a dumpster fire in the courtroom,” he wrote.
He wrote that Daniels was “in her element in Merchan’s courtroom.”
“In New York, the relevance or credibility of witnesses like Daniels is largely immaterial,” he explained.
Turley wrote that it was “a bit late for the court to express shock over her testimony. It is not the witness, but the case that seems increasingly obscene.”
