THE CROSS-EXAMINATION OF STORMY DANIELS picked up today where it left off Tuesday in Donald Trump’s Manhattan trial, with defense attorney Susan Necheles’s argumentative questioning of the porn star at the center of the 2016 case involving Trump hiding information from voters. One thing that’s striking: Necheles’s questions seemed more contoured to her client’s desire to retaliate than to advance the defense’s theory of the case. Trump was reported to be enjoying it. But with Daniels’s scrappy answers and apparent authenticity, the belabored back-and-forth may have distracted the jury from the Trump team’s legal defense.
Let’s set the scene: Trump, recall, is being prosecuted for falsifying business records to cover up the buying of Daniel’s silence just before the 2016 election. She gave chilling testimony Tuesday morning about their sexual encounter in a Lake Tahoe hotel, where, as she described it, his behavior was loutish and predatory.
Necheles, an experienced defense lawyer on Trump’s team, started off Thursday with questions pressing hard on the view that Daniels is an extortionist. While it’s easy to second-guess a cross-examination from afar, Necheles seemed to be making unforced errors.
Her aggressive approach, and her prolonging of the cross-examination Thursday with nitpicks about whether Daniels and Trump actually had dinner together, appeared to go far afield—and seemed at odds with the opening statement made by her colleague on Trump’s legal team, Todd Blanche. By the time Daniels left the stand shortly after noon on Thursday, an observer might have been left wondering if Necheles’s tactics had been dictated by a willful client who thinks he always knows best.
HERE’S THE BACKGROUND: In October 2016, Michael Cohen, Trump’s one-time lawyer and fixer, paid Daniels $130,000 to keep her quiet days before the 2016 election and days after the blockbuster Access Hollywood story broke. In the trial last week, Hope Hicks, Trump’s confidante and aide, testified that at that fragile campaign moment, her boss was concerned about the effect of more sexual scandals on his presidential prospects. According to prosecutors, after the election, Trump caused business records to be falsified to bury the pre-election pay-off and its purpose—keeping the truth from voters.
Daniels testified that Trump told her that she reminded him of his daughter. “You’re smart and you’re blond,” Daniels recalled Trump saying. (It’s hard to imagine a pickup line where the empty flattery of the first part is better betrayed by the shallowness of the second.) Trump’s comparison of his daughter to an adult film actress he was trying to have sex with might clank against the jury’s memory of Blanche’s opening statement. His pitch was that Trump was a husband and father “just like you and me.”
Jurors do not forget such things. When actual testimony turns on its head what a lawyer said in his opening words to them, it’s never good for his client.
For Trump, it must have been excruciating to have the world hear that it wasn’t his charm that got him what he wanted from Daniels that evening in his hotel room. Even though she did not say that he forced her, she testified to being startled at seeing him suddenly in his underwear when she emerged from a restroom visit, the hotel room spinning, and his looming physical presence when she went for the door. No wonder Trump was heard cursing during her testimony.
Trump reportedly kept elbowing Necheles to object when her trial experience had her refraining. Nonetheless, she did as instructed.
