Stormy Daniels

Subterms

    More stories

    • 213 Shares109 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump’s hush-money case has proven he’s a low-life. Can it prove he’s a criminal? | Margaret Sullivan

      by

      When you set out to explore Donald Trump’s personal life and business practices, you don’t expect to meet any paragons of virtue.Sleazy media figures who buy and “kill” damaging stories? Yes. An adult film actor ready to tell all to make a buck? Certainly. A parade of spokespeople and staffers who compromised their own integrity during his presidential administration? No doubt.A conman, philanderer and grifter himself, the ex-president always has surrounded himself with dicey characters. That’s how he rolls. So it’s hardly surprising that Michael Cohen, the star prosecution witness in the so-called “hush-money” case unfolding in New York City, fits right in.The former Trump lawyer and fixer pleaded guilty in 2018 to campaign-finance violations, tax fraud and bank fraud. He pleaded guilty to lying to Congress. He went to jail. And he was disbarred.That’s why it would be funny – if it weren’t so cringe-inducing – to hear the way Cohen is being praised by some commentators in the endless talk loop of cable-news trial coverage.“Michael’s one of the good guys,” was the assessment of CNN guest-talker Anthony Scaramucci, who memorably lasted less than two weeks as Trump’s communications director and who is now vehemently opposed to Trump winning a second term.I’m all for redemption, but I wouldn’t go that far. I certainly wouldn’t hold up Michael Cohen as an example of a great American.But, against the odds, Cohen’s testimony does ring true. (Not that one can hear it directly; unfortunately, the trial is not being televised or even recorded for audio only.)His words, and the description of his demeanor from those inside the courtroom, make a kind of consistent and logical sense. What’s more, much of it has been “pre-corroborated” by testimony and evidence earlier in the trial.We’ve heard from people such as David Pecker, who ran the National Enquirer, where he caused damaging stories to be given the “catch-and-kill” treatment to help Trump gain the presidency in 2016. We’ve seen supporting text messages and emails and documents.On the stand on Monday, Cohen didn’t spare himself. He admits he lied and falsified in protecting his boss. He even admitted to secretly recording Trump during a one-on-one meeting and, because the audio has gone public, we can hear the two of them hashing out one of their seedy arrangements; respectable lawyers don’t do that to or with their clients.And he certainly didn’t spare Trump, instead portraying him as the equivalent of a mob boss, as well as someone intimately involved with every decision in keeping his tawdry relationships secret as he sought the presidency in 2016.What the New York district attorney must prove, though, is criminality, not low-life behavior.Will a jury decide that Trump’s behavior amounted to criminal election interference? That will require a lot of connecting the dots – that Stormy Daniels not only was paid off to keep quiet about the time she claims to have had sex with Trump, but that the payment was then recorded falsely in a way that violates campaign finance law.If those dots are going to be connected, it’s Cohen who must connect them.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIt’s not an airtight case. Rather, it is “the least muscular and existentially threatening of the four criminal prosecutions Trump faces”, wrote the Trump biographer Tim O’Brien this week.But it’s likely to be the only case that’s going to come to trial before the election. For those who want a shred of accountability for Trump’s endless misdeeds, this is the one they’ve got. And, given that, Cohen is essential.Can jurors find him credible, given his checkered past? Even if they do, is it possible to make the leap to criminal violations of campaign-finance law? And could every one of them then agree to convict?That’s an Everest-high mountain to climb. Trump’s lawyers are sure to bombard Cohen with his foibles during cross-examination later this week.My take is that Michael Cohen is – finally – telling the truth. He’ll hold up well under the hostile questioning. Jurors will believe him and will buy most of his story, given his consistency and the corroborating evidence and earlier testimony.Finally, Michael Cohen will come off like an honest broker.As for a jury then connecting that credibility to criminal election-law interference? And then, unanimously, deciding to convict the former president?That’s a big stretch.I can believe Michael Cohen’s testimony, but – at least right now – I can’t believe in that outcome.
      Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist More

    • 213 Shares139 Views

      in US Politics

      Stormy Daniels’s testimony paints a dark picture of Trump’s view of sex and power | Moira Donegan

      by

      He seems to have understood it as a business deal. That’s what Stormy Daniels – the former porn star whose account of a sexual encounter with Donald Trump at a celebrity golf tournament in 2006 is at the center of his criminal hush-money trial – told Anderson Cooper in 2018. When Trump summoned Daniels to his hotel room in Lake Tahoe, he suggested that she might come on his television show, Celebrity Apprentice. Then he demanded sex.In the law this is called quid pro quo – this for that – an arrangement in which work is offered in exchange for sex. It’s illegal: sex cannot be a condition of employment, or a prerequisite for being considered for a job, under laws that are designed to punish sexual harassment and make workplaces accessible and tolerable for women. But Trump has long had a casual relationship to the law.Daniels has described the sex that followed as a grim affair, performed out of a begrudging sense of obligation. “I realized exactly what I’d gotten myself into,” she told Cooper of coming out of the bathroom to find Trump lying on his bed, in his underwear. “And I was like, ‘Ugh, here we go.’ And I just felt like maybe – it was sort of – I had it coming for making a bad decision for going to someone’s room alone. And I just heard the voice in my head, ‘Well, you put yourself in a bad situation and bad things happen, so you deserve this.’”On the stand at Trump’s criminal hush-money trial in New York on Tuesday, she described the same moment, saying, “The room spun in slow motion. I thought, ‘Oh, my God, what did I misread to get here?’” Trump told her that she reminded him of his daughter. He did not use a condom.For a while after that, Trump kept calling Daniels, asking to see her again. When he called, he would again mention the prospect of her appearing on The Apprentice. They met one more time, a year later, in a hotel room where Trump was watching Shark Week. He tried to initiate sex again, and Daniels refused. Later, she got a call informing her that she would not be cast on his show.The hush-money trial that has been proceeding chaotically in New York over the past four weeks is broadly considered to be the weakest of the four criminal cases proceeding against Trump – and, perhaps not incidentally, it is also the only one that will be tried before he again stands for election this November. Before Tuesday, the testimonies were dense with proceduralism, talking about attorney accounting practices and editorial meetings at tabloids. This was all meant to explain to the jury – and to the voters following along at home – the nature of Trump’s “catch-and-kill” scheme with the National Enquirer, an arrangement in which the tabloid purchased the rights to unflattering stories about Trump – like Daniels’s – and then hid them from public view, silencing the relevant parties with NDAs.But the focus on technicalities can obscure the gendered nature of the arrangement: at the center of the allegations is an elaborate, multi-party scheme to prevent women from speaking in public about their experiences with Trump – to stop what they know from becoming what the voters know, and to keep their stories of Trump’s conduct toward them hidden.An anxiety about women’s speech – about what they might say about men, and how their words might affront or embarrass – animates much of our popular discourses around sexual misconduct, due process and the boundaries of acceptable sexual behavior. But it is rare that the mechanisms used to silence women are made so visible, or rendered so explicit in their relation to electoral politics. Trump’s fixers, after all, had reason to be especially worried about the stories of women like Stormy Daniels. At the time that the deal at issue in the case was finalized, in October of 2016, the Access Hollywood tape had been released, in which Trump bragged about grabbing women by their genitals. More than two dozen women have since accused him of sexual misconduct; there are likely others that we don’t know about.Daniels has said repeatedly that she did not refuse the sex with Trump, and that she does not consider herself a victim. She has also said that the encounter was marked by what on Tuesday she called a “power imbalance”, and that she did not feel she had full freedom to decline it. She has always described the encounter as distasteful and unwanted; she has spoken of being afraid of Trump in the aftermath.Conversations over sexual misconduct frequently become conversations over semantics, in which debates about what counts as rape or assault or harassment stand in for the unasked question about what is a decent, respectful and humane way to treat women. But we need not litigate a definition of Daniels’s encounter, or place it into a different category than she does, to say that what Trump did to her in that encounter was marked by a profound sense of sexual entitlement, and by false promises and gestures toward bribery that make it clear he knew that Daniels did not desire him. That such encounters are usually not called rape does not mean that they do not index a gendered form of exploitation, the leveraging of a man’s money and position for access to an unwilling woman’s body.What followed, too, was a gendered form of exploitation: a conspiracy to secure her silence. Trump’s attorneys will argue that paying a woman in order to get her to sign an NDA is not illegal; even the prosecution is arguing that the criminality is not in seeking Daniels’s silence, but in trying to cover up the arrangement afterward.But legality is not the only standard of morality, and it should disturb us all, as believers in free expression, open inquiry and an informed public, that a group of powerful people went to such extensive and allegedly felonious lengths to prevent women from telling the truth about what men did to them. Daniels is the first woman to take the stand in the hush-money trial. That’s partly because the people who arranged the catch and kill scheme were all men.
      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

    • 175 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      Mockery, low tactics, sexist tropes: gloriously, Stormy Daniels is repaying Donald Trump in kind

      by

      The spectacle of Stormy Daniels on the witness stand in a Manhattan courtroom this week sent one back to the image of Trump’s last female antagonist, E Jean Carroll, the advice columnist who famously sued Trump for sexually assaulting her, standing victorious outside another courtroom in January. Daniels, unlike Carroll, is not the plaintiff in this case. Nonetheless, Trump’s fortunes rest, to a large degree, on her credibility, a 45-year-old former porn star who the New York Times described this week as “a complicated and imperfect witness”. If Carroll – elegant, measured, articulate – was the perfect victim, Daniels is practically the archetype of the woman court systems tend to revile. And yet, on the strength of her opening testimony, she strikes me as Trump’s very worst nightmare.This impression is extrajudicial. Daniels, who has already been rebuked by the judge for straying off topic, may prove too wayward a witness to achieve what Carroll did: the civil case equivalent of a guilty verdict against a man almost supernaturally able to avoid them. If we are looking beyond verdicts to the public image, however, Daniels is in some ways by far the more menacing foe for Trump. You couldn’t make up the details of her testimony this week, which sent court reporters scrambling to find sober ways to present her account of spanking Trump with a rolled up magazine and insisting on having sex with her without a condom. This is a woman willing to meet Trump at his preferred site of conflict – public humiliation – and on the evidence so far, he isn’t weathering it well.Last year, during the Carroll hearing, the former president defaulted to the standard tittering, smirking, mocking performance he reserves for critical women – be they accusing him of rape or running against him for president. Accounts from the courtroom this week suggest this persona was no match for Daniels. The Associated Press reported that Trump “squirmed and scowled” during Daniels’ testimony. The Washington Post recorded him in the act of “angry, profane muttering”, which won Trump his own rebuke from the judge. “I understand your client is upset but he is cursing audibly,” said Judge Merchan to Trump’s lawyers. Upset! Go Stormy.As with so many episodes involving Trump, this is a spectacular reversal of cultural norms. Women like Daniels tend not to prosper in court, where unruliness that might be considered rakish in a man is more likely to be read in women as a byword for trash. None of that quite applies here. One has always understood about Daniels that, at some deep level, she has Trump’s number and knows how to hit him where it hurts. If the narrative he constructed around the Carroll accusation was the classic too-ugly-to-rape defence, this won’t work with Daniels – 30 years his junior and a confident sexual operator who appears hellbent on depicting Trump as a pathetic little man. While they were having sex, she said on Tuesday, she recalled, “trying to think of anything other than what was happening”.The lingering question, apart from what the magazine she allegedly spanked him with was (was it the Economist? Or, as all British people over a certain age immediately thought, a Woman’s Weekly? Was it, in a pleasing dramatic irony, a copy of the Enquirer?), is how will this land with his supporters? Trump has long capitalised on the idea that he is the kind of “pussy-grabbing” sexual aggressor who might enjoy sex with a porn star. Until now, we have never heard from the other side – and Daniels’ description of him as a man allegedly more interested in quizzing her on STD testing and whether sex workers are unionised, rather than actually having sex, replaces his swaggering self-image with a fussy, emasculated alternative. If Trump destroys women by reducing them to sexist tropes, Daniels has come back at him with exactly the same.This manoeuvre, as Trump’s lawyers pointed out while asking for a mistrial (it was denied), has nothing to do with the facts of the case, which hinges on whether or not Trump paid Daniels $130,000 (£104,000) in hush money in the run up to the 2016 election, and then covered it up by falsifying business records. Trump and his team know what Daniels is doing – which is flatly, salaciously and in incredible detail – making an absolute mockery of him in front of the world. It is, they have argued, unfair. It is below the belt. It is unmistakably, compellingly, and as it may turn out, successfully, an approach borrowed from Trump’s own playbook.
      Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist More

    • 125 Shares109 Views

      in US Politics

      Stormy Daniels takes the stand in Trump trial – podcast

      by

      It was the moment Donald Trump was dreading. The former president could only sit and watch as the adult film actor Stormy Daniels told her version of events from an alleged sexual encounter they had in 2006. Prosecutors say that Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen shuttled a $130,000 hush-money payment to Daniels less than two weeks before the 2016 presidential election, to keep her from talking to anyone about her alleged encounter with Trump.
      So how bad was Daniels’ testimony for the presumptive GOP candidate? Jonathan Freedland and the political commentator Molly Jong-Fast discuss an extraordinary day in a Manhattan courtroom

      How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know More

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      How the Trump trial is playing in Maga world: sublime indifference, collective shrug

      by

      In one America, he cuts a diminished, humbled figure during coverage that runs from morn till night. “He seems considerably older and he seems annoyed, resigned, maybe angry,” said broadcaster Rachel Maddow after seeing Donald Trump up close in court. “He seems like a man who is miserable to be here.”But in the other America – that of Fox News, far-right podcasts and the Make America Great Again (Maga) base – the trial of the former president over a case involving a hush-money payment to an adult film performer is playing out very differently.Here, anger at what is seen as political persecution meets with another emotion: sublime indifference. Barely a handful of Trump supporters bother to protest each day outside the court in New York, a Democratic stronghold. The trial receives less prominence in conservative media, which prefers to devote airtime to other national news including protests on university campuses against the war in Gaza.The divergence ensures that, with TV cameras not permitted in court, two rival narratives are forming around the first criminal trial of an ex-US president. In one telling, Trump is a philander who falsified business records to illegally influence the 2016 presidential election. In the other, he is the victim of a justice department conspiracy designed to rob the Republican nominee of victory in 2024.Michael Steele, a former chair of the Republican National Committee, said: “The minds in those orbits are already made up. If you’re listening to [far-right podcaster] Steve Bannon, you’re not going to be convinced by any other outcome except not guilty. If you are hyperventilating over coverage that speaks to Donald Trump’s guilt, then you’re not going to be happy unless he’s found guilty.”The trial, which began in earnest this week with prosecution and defence arguments, would already be devastating for any conventional politician. The former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker testified about his tabloid’s efforts to protect Trump from stories that could hurt his electoral chances using a “catch-and-kill” scheme. The capricious defendant is also awaiting a ruling on whether he will be held in contempt for violating a gag order, an offence he has been accused of 14 times.View image in fullscreenThe trial has dominated cable news networks such as CNN and MSNBC to the extent that they have faced criticism for obsessing over details such as Trump’s daily commute to court and his demeanour once inside. But in the Maga universe, there is a collective shrug.Matt Gertz, a senior fellow at the watchdog Media Matters for America, said: “The rightwing media very much does not want to be talking about this week. You see both CNN and MSNBC covering the trial pretty much throughout as it plays out, whereas over on Fox it’s one of many stories that they’re covering and not a particularly prominent one at that.”Fox News, America’s most watched cable television network, has similarly played down past Trump dramas such as the impeachment trials and the congressional panel investigating the January 6 attack, Gertz noted. “You see a similar situation where news outlets are providing constant coverage of big breaking news events and Fox News is feeding its audience its typical culture war mix and avoiding talking about what is quite clearly bad news for their candidate of choice.”When Trump-friendly networks do turn to the trial, they give viewers an alternative narrative from the one dominating CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times and the Washington Post. After a hearing has wrapped for the day, Fox News regularly carries live coverage of Trump’s diatribes against the judge, Biden and the cold temperature of the courtroom.It has also amplified his narrative of martyrdom. Newt Gingrich, a former House speaker, told Fox News: “This is literally like some of the civil rights workers in Mississippi in the 1960s.” Jesse Watters, a co-host on The Five on the same network, worried that it is unfair to make a man who is almost 80 sit for hour after hour. “It’s not healthy,” he said. “He needs sunlight. He needs activity. He needs to be walking around. He needs action. It is really cruel and unusual punishment to make a man do that, and any time he moves, they threaten to throw him in prison.”They have even defended Trump – who regularly mocks Biden as “Sleepy Joe” – for falling asleep in court. Sean Hannity, a Fox News host, said on his radio show: “By the way, I think I’d fall asleep if I was there.” His colleague Laura Ingraham added: “I’d be falling asleep at that trial, too.”Gertz observed: “They’re basically making the case that actually it’s good to be unable to not nod off in the middle of your own trial. These are people who have spent the last several years attacking Joe Biden for supposedly being too old, too enfeebled to be president. They understand that their viewers, to the extent that they are interested in the trial at all, want to hear full-throated support for Donald Trump, and so they are finding ways to provide that.”The trial has provoked fury on the far right and vows of retribution. Mike Davis, a lawyer and Trump ally, told Bannon’s War Room podcast that Democrats are “running a criminal conspiracy to violate the civil rights of President Trump” and promised to “rain hell on these Biden Democrats”. Davis warned: “I would say to these guys, lawyer up.”View image in fullscreenInterviews with longstanding Trump supporters found the media-coverage split screen translates to one’s view of the trial. There is no sign that the airing of the charges that Trump falsified business records to cover up a hush-money payment is shifting opinions.Steve Robinson, 75, an engineer and contractor from Leesburg, Virginia, is following the trial via the rightwing channels One America News Network and Newsmax and, occasionally, Fox News. “No CNN,” he said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionRobinson commented: “The charges are made up and it’s a travesty of justice. It’s embarrassing for us as a country that’s happening when there is no evidence and there is no damage to anyone and it’s obviously a political witch-hunt. The leftists are enjoying it.”Lynette Kennedy McQuain, 63, an insurance salesperson from Lost Creek, West Virginia, said: “New York should spend their tax dollars on criminal behaviour, things that are going on in the city rather than trying to take down a former president. It’s not illegal to pay money to quiet something if you want to.”The current trial is seen as potentially the least serious of the four criminal cases against Trump but is likely to be the only one completed before the election. McQuain added: “It’s gotten to the place now where there’s so many trials that you wonder where it’s going to end.“How many more trials are we going to put Donald Trump through? He’s a presidential candidate again. Come on, that’s a little crazy to me. The whole country sees it that way except a few left-leaning people who just want to get Trump. Judicially we’ve got a whole bunch of other things we could be fighting.”Michael Sheppard, 42, a home builder from Canton, North Carolina, who has been following the trial “passingly” via the social media platform X, said: “I know the trial exists. I know the basics behind it but I really don’t care what they say.”Sheppard believes that it is common practice to pay someone off out of court if the alternative would be more costly. He intends to vote for Trump in November but added: “I wish we had somebody right of Trump. Trump’s a centrist.”Opinion polls have tightened in recent weeks with Biden closing the gap on Trump. It is uncertain what impact the trial will have on the election. The former president himself is thought unlikely to testify, but the court is likely to hear lurid, sordid details that even Trump’s allies in the media might find hard to resist. He is not out of danger yet.Charlie Sykes, a political columnist and author of How the Right Lost Its Mind, said: “The danger of this trial for Trump and for the rightwing media is that many of the details are going to be quite salacious, quite dramatic and easily understood.“People are going to understand a Playboy model saying ‘I had an affair’ as opposed to some of the more arcane things. It’s going to be interesting to see how the rightwing media covers it. Fox News are going to be torn between ‘this is pretty compelling material’ versus ‘it’s also pretty damaging’.”But the experience of the past eight years suggest that Trump’s base understand who he is and are willing to accept it, sexual peccadilloes and all. Sean Spicer, his first White House press secretary, said: “I would argue that after four years of Trump in office and almost four years of Biden, people have pretty much made up their mind who they’re with and this is largely going to be a get-out-the-vote-operation election.“I don’t think anyone seeing anything right now on television or reading it online is somehow going to learn something new about Donald Trump.” More

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump on Trial: National Enquirer boss dishes on Trump

      by

      You’re reading the Guardian US’s free Trump on Trial newsletter. To get the latest court developments delivered to your inbox, sign up here.On the docket: Pecker tells allDavid Pecker, the former publisher of the National Enquirer, returned to the witness stand on Tuesday as a witness for the prosecution and explained to jurors how he coordinated with Donald Trump and his team to bury scandals about the then candidate during the 2016 campaign.Pecker laid out how he’d repeatedly paid to purchase stories about Trump’s alleged marital infidelities before keeping them from reaching the light of day – a scheme known as “catch-and-kill” that prosecutors claim Trump illegally falsified business records to conceal in order to help his presidential campaign.Pecker said he had a “great relationship” with Trump that dated back to the late 1980s – then spent the next hours of testimony damning him with not-so-faint praise.Pecker described Trump as “very knowledgeable”, “very detail-oriented”, “very cautious and very frugal”, and “almost a micromanager” in his business dealings. Those complimentary descriptions hurt Trump because prosecutors need to prove that Trump had direct knowledge of the scheme to pay his attorney Michael Cohen back for his payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels by falsely labeling them as business expenses.Pecker then discussed a 2015 meeting he had at Trump Tower with Trump, Cohen and Hope Hicks, a top Trump campaign official, where they asked him what he could do “to help the campaign”.He promised to be the campaign’s “eyes and ears” to find out about “women selling stories” about Trump, and work to kill them, because Trump was “well known as the most eligible bachelor and dated the most beautiful women” (another unhelpful compliment for Trump, who had been married to his third wife, Melania, for a decade at that point). He then testified that he routinely coordinated with Cohen at Trump’s behest to run negative stories about Trump’s political foes. It’s a misdemeanor under New York law to conspire to promote the election of someone by unlawful means.Pecker then walked through two schemes to catch and kill those stories. The first was paying Trump Tower doorman Dino Sajudin $30,000 for the rights to a story about Trump fathering a child with a maid who worked in the building. When Pecker told Cohen the Enquirer would pay the fee itself (even though he didn’t plan to run the story), he said Cohen told him “the boss would be very pleased”.Pecker then testified that he bought the rights to the story of Karen McDougal, a former model who claims she had an affair with Trump.Pecker said Trump called him once about McDougal, but that most of his interactions were with Cohen.“Michael was very agitated – it looked like he was getting a lot of pressure,” Pecker said shortly before court adjourned for the day.Pecker will return to the witness stand when the trial resumes on Thursday. He’ll likely finish testifying about McDougal and move on to explain his role in connecting Trump’s team to Stormy Daniels.Judge rips Trump’s lawyer during contempt hearingView image in fullscreenOn Tuesday morning, before the trial resumed with Pecker’s testimony, Judge Juan Merchan held a hearing to determine whether he should find Trump in contempt for repeatedly violating his gag order prohibiting the former president from attacking potential witnesses and jurors.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAs Hugo Lowell reported from the courtroom, it didn’t go well for Trump’s team.Merchan was deeply skeptical of arguments from Trump attorney Todd Blanche, expressing frustration that Blanche wasn’t answering his questions about Trump’s specific social media posts, and rebuking him for his arguments.“Mr Blanche, you’re losing all credibility, I have to tell you right now,” Merchan said at one point. “You’re losing all credibility with the court.”Prosecutors had highlighted 10 different Trump social media posts in which he’d attacked likely witnesses including Cohen and Daniels and reposted attacks on the jury itself. They also said they’d file paperwork on an 11th example: Trump left court on Monday and immediately went on camera to attack Cohen by name. They said they wouldn’t seek jail time for the violations, but asked Merchan to fine Trump the legal maximum of $1,000 for each violation.Blanche’s arguments that Trump was “allowed to respond to political attacks” and that, in some cases, he was just resharing others’ comments didn’t fly with Merchan.“Give me one. Give me one recent attack he was responding to,” Merchan said when Blanche said Trump was just responding in kind.Merchan didn’t issue a ruling on whether he’d hold Trump in contempt.But Trump was nonetheless furious. After court concluded for the day, the former president complained to reporters that the “totally unconstitutional” gag was blocking him from attacking likely witnesses.“They can say whatever they want, they can lie, but I’m not allowed to say anything. I just have to sit back and look at why a conflicted judge has ordered me to have a gag order,” he said. More

    • 188 Shares149 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump’s hush-money trial: National Enquirer publisher says he was ‘eyes and ears’ of 2016 campaign

      by

      Donald Trump sat for the second day of witness testimony in court in Manhattan on Tuesday in his criminal trial over hush-money payments to an adult film star and an alleged fraudulent cover-up of those payments just weeks before the 2016 election.David Pecker, the ex-president’s longtime ally and former publisher of the National Enquirer – who prosecutors contend was integral in illicit, so-called catch-and-kill efforts to prevent negative stories about Trump from going public – was on the stand again as a prosecution witness after a brief appearance on Monday following opening statements.He told the court about being invited to a meeting with Trump and his then lawyer, Michael Cohen, in New York in 2015 after Trump had just declared his candidacy for president and was seeking a friendly and powerful media insider.“They asked me what can I do – and what my magazines could do – to help the [election] campaign … I said what I would do is I would run or publish positive stories about Mr Trump and I would publish negative stories about his opponents, and I said that I would also be the eyes and ears because I know that the Trump Organization had a very small staff,” he said.Earlier on Tuesday, however, Judge Juan Merchan heard arguments about a request from prosecutors to hold Trump in contempt of court. They said he repeatedly violated a gag order barring him from publicly attacking witnesses in the trial.Todd Blanche, Trump’s lawyer, argued that his client was just responding to political attacks, not flouting the judge’s order, and that seven of the instances cited were reposts of other people’s content on social media, which “we don’t believe are a violation of the gag order.”Merchan asked whether there was any case law on it. Blanche replied: “I don’t have any case laws, your honor, it’s just common sense.”As Blanche continued to repeat that claim, the judgesaid:“Mr Blanche you’re losing all credibility…with the court. Is there any other argument you want to make?”Merchan on Tuesday did not announce a decision on the contempt issue.Trump’s criminal hush-money trial: what to know
      A guide to Trump’s hush-money trial – so far
      The key arguments prosecutors will use against Trump
      How will Trump’s trial work?
      From Michael Cohen to Stormy Daniels: The key players
      Pecker first took the stand on Monday and provided brief testimony of his work as a tabloid honcho. “We used checkbook journalism and we paid for stories. I gave a number to the editors that they could not spend more than $10,000 to investigate or produce or publish a story, anything over $10,000 they would spend on a story, they would have to be vetted and brought up to me, for approval.”Pecker said he had final say over the content of the National Enquirer and other AMI publications.Prosecutors contend that Pecker was at the center of a plot to boost Trump’s chances in the 2016 election. The alleged plan with Trump and Cohen was, if Pecker caught wind of damaging information, he would apprise Trump and Cohen, so they could figure out a way to keep it quiet. That collusion came to include AMI’s $150,000 payoff to the Playboy model Karen McDougal, who claimed to have had an extramarital affair with Trump, prosecutors have said.This kind of “catch-and-kill” tactic did not happen with Trump before he ran for president, Pecker said.The alleged plot to cover up a claimed sexual encounter between Daniels and Trump is the basis of prosecutors’ case.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn October 2016, the Washington Post published a video featuring Trump’s hot-mic comments during an Access Hollywood taping, in which he boasted about sexually assaulting women. The comments, which Colangelo read to jurors, included “Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything … Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.”After they surfaced, the campaign went into panic mode, Colangelo said. It worked to characterize these comments as “locker room talk”, but, when Daniels’ claim came across Trump and his allies’ radar, they feared the backlash: people would see these ill-behaved ways were not mere talk.“Another story about infidelity, with a porn star, on the heels of the Access Hollywood tape, would have been devastating to his campaign,” Colangelo said in his address to jurors. “Cohen carried out a $130,000 payoff to Daniels which Trump allegedly repaid him in checks that he listed as legal services in official company records.“Look, no politician wants bad press, but the evidence at trial will show that this wasn’t spin or communication strategy,” Colangelo continued. “This was a planned, coordinated, long-running conspiracy to influence the 2016 election, to help Donald Trump get elected through illegal expenditures – to silence people with something bad to say about his behavior.“It was election fraud, pure and simple.”Trump denies the charges. On Tuesday afternoon, Steinglass asked why Pecker said he would notify Cohen if he heard “anything about women selling stories”.Pecker said: “In a presidential campaign, I was the person that thought that there would be a lot of women that would come out to try to sell their stories because Mr Trump was well-known as the most eligible bachelor and dated the most beautiful women.”In fact, he was also accused of sexual assault and harassment by a series of women. In a civil case, Trump was found liable last year for having sexually abused the New York writer E Jean Carroll in the 1990s.Pecker said he ran negative stories about Trump rivals, including presidential opponent Hillary Clinton and GOP rivals Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio.He said he paid $30,000 to catch and kill a story from a doorman purporting that Trump had fathered an illegitimate child with a woman who cleaned his New York penthouse.The trial is due to resume on Thursday. More

    • 188 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump’s historic criminal trial officially begins as first potential jurors are sworn in – live

      by

      The first batch of potential jurors has been sworn in by the judge, Juan Merchan.This makes Donald Trump the first US president, former or president, to stand trial.Since they’re sworn in, the trial has officially started.Speaking to a press pool outside the courtroom on Monday, Trump repeatedly called the trial a “scam” and stated it was preventing him from attending his son’s high school graduation, appearing at a supreme court hearing, and campaigning for the upcoming presidential election.“If you read all of the legal pundits or the legal scholars today, there’s not one that I’ve seen that said, this is a case it should be brought or tried,” he said. “It’s a scam. It’s a political witch-hunt. It continues, and it continues forever. And we’re not going to be given a fair trial. It’s a very, very sad thing.”Trump opened his remarks to the pool with complaints about his son’s graduation ceremony, which the former president’s legal team requested a day off to attend. Although the judge has yet to make an official ruling on the matter, Trump acted as though it had been denied.“As you know, my son is graduating from high school and it looks like the judge will not let me go to the graduation of my son,” he said. “I was looking forward to that graduation, with his mother and father there, and it looks like the judge does not allow me to escape this scam.”Trump claimed he may not be able to travel to Washington DC for a supreme court hearing to decide whether he should be awarded presidential immunity exempting him from criminal charges that he conspired to overturn the results of the 2020 election. He also said his inability to campaign in key states before the presidential election due to the trial would ultimately benefit Democrats.“These are very complex things, and he’s not going to allow me to leave here for a half a day to go to DC and go before the United States supreme court, because he thinks he’s superior to the supreme court,” Trump said.Trump did not answer reporters’ questions.Merchan told prospective jurors that the court would adjourn for the day, and that they should return early tomorrow so he can start at 9.30am ET.Earlier, the judge admonished the defense team for returning late from the afternoon break.The morning was taken up by proceedings. The atmosphere in the courtroom appeared calm, with Donald Trump at times appearing to doze off during proceedings. Much of the courtroom was left empty to allow room for jurors.Jury selection did not start until later in the afternoon, and if the activity outside the courthouse was any indication, it will take lawyers a few days to select an unbiased group of New Yorkers who will ultimately decide the outcome of the trial.Outside of the courthouse, multiple news channels were doing wall-to-wall coverage of the trial.A few people holding what appeared to be jury ID slips – which jurors are sent in the mail and told to bring with them the day they are summoned to court – were let into the line of people entering the building. Some, looking bewildered, stopped to take pictures of the scene before entering the courthouse.Jury duty in America can often be a banal affair, a day spent in a courthouse filling out forms and telling lawyers when you’ve scheduled your next vacation.But for those New Yorkers summoned to the state courthouse on Monday, it was a day when the ordinary became extraordinary. They arrived to a frenetic scene of loud protest and high security in downtown Manhattan – a sure sign that Donald Trump was yet again in court.Though the procedures that played out in the courtroom at 100 Centre St were banal, their significance was pure history: the first US president facing criminal charges at trial. Not only that, but it comes at a time when Trump is all but guaranteed to be his party’s nominee for the 2024 presidential election.Police closed off the block in front of the courthouse to pedestrians, requiring people to show press or court badges to get onto the street to the building. That didn’t stop passersby, including double-decker tour buses heading downtown, from stopping to ogle at the spectacle.Court is back in session, and the jury selection process will continue.Donald Trump did not respond to questions as he returned to the courtroom.The court is taking a short recess.Donald Trump watched as the prospective jurors filed out of the room. He then rose and left the courtroom.He did not answer questions nor give a wave or thumbs up as he walked past reporters.One excused prospective juror made clear their feelings as they left.“I just couldn’t do it,” they were overheard saying, according to a pool reporter.Judge Merchan has begun calling individual jurors to answer questions from the 42-point questionnaire they were given.It begins by asking basic biographical information about where prospective jurors live, their marital status, occupation and hobbies, as well as their sources of news.Many of these questions require yes-or-no answers. Lawyers will be able to ask follow-up questions later.Trump followed along intently with his own copy of the questionnaire as the first possible juror, a woman, gave her answers.While Donald Trump is in court in New York for the Stormy Daniels hush-money trial, his account on his social media platform is posting through it.His Truth Social page is putting up new posts minute by minute, full of boasts about Trump or complaints about the charges he faces in this case and others.The hush-money trial is the first of Trump’s cases to go to trial. This incessant posting could be an indication of how he intends to market himself amid the court battles, a way to distract from the case itself.It is also a sign that he thinks leaning into the court cases, rather than avoiding talking about them, helps him with his followers.The frenetic pace of the posts, though, with dozens just this morning, is a lot even for Trump. It’s unclear whether Trump himself is posting or people from his team are.So far this morning, he has posted claiming the cases are an example of election interference and a sign that Biden and the Democrats are scared he will win. He has shared articles and videos about the cases, the border, the “stolen” election, his golf game, the Israel war, Ukraine, polls. He has posted videos about the cases with platitudes about how “they” are trying to steal the election from him and his supporters.The judge asked prospective jurors to raise their hands if they believed they could not be fair and impartial. Judge Merchan said:
      If you have an honest, legitimate, good-faith reason to believe you cannot serve on this case or cannot be fair and impartial, please let me know now.
      More than half of prospective jurors in the first panel of 96 people have been excused.Judge Merchan listed the names of more than 40 people who could be involved in the trial, including Stormy Daniels, Michael Cohen, David Pecker, members of the Trump family, Rudy Giuliani, former Trump presidential staffer Hope Hicks and Trump’s former chief of staff Reince Priebus.The judge noted that not all of them will appear as witnesses but that their names could be raised at trial.Merchan is giving the first batch of jurors introductory instructions, extolling the importance of jury service while explaining the basics of the case. He told jurors:
      You are about to participate in a trial by jury. The system of trial by jury is one the cornerstones of our judicial system.
      Many of the prospective jurors stretched their necks to get a look at Donald Trump once in their seats. One giggled and put her hand over her mouth, looking at the person seated next to her with raised eyebrows. Several appeared to frequently stare at the former president as Merchan introduced the case.
      The jury’s responsibility is to evaluate the testimony and all of the evidence presented at the trial … The trial is the opportunity for you to decide if the defendant is guilty or not guilty.
      Trump stood and turned around as he was introduced as the defendant, giving the prospective jurors a little tight-lipped smirk.Trump looked straight ahead, expressionless in the direction of the judge as Merchan addressed the prospective jurors, occasionally looking towards the jury box.Merchan has rescheduled the hearing for whether Donald Trump will be held in contempt of court has been changed from 24 April to 23 April 9.30am ET. More