It’s hard to imagine a worse day in court than having a reliable witness come in, throw his own client, Stormy Daniels, under the New York Subway train, and then completely disembowel the prosecution’s case, at least the one they’re selling to the jury.
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That’s what happened Thursday in the Hush Trump case in Manhattan. The Get Trump prosecutors’ big coup of a witness, Stormy Daniels’ attorney Keith Davidson, basically pantsed D.A. Alvin Bragg, his assistant D.A., and lead prosecutor Matthew Colangelo in front of God and everybody.
First, Davidson threw his client, the former adult movie copulator, under the B train by leaving her naked and exposed as the conniving extortionist she has always appeared to be in this shakedown of Trump. Davidson, who insisted on correcting attorneys nomenclature and another verbiage on the stand, pedantically yet thoroughly, discredited the prosecution’s case that Trump frantically tried to silence the statuesque porno professional for a supposed long-ago tryst for the purpose of stealing the 2016 election. If you’re new here, this is the prosecution’s theory. There’s more to it than that, but stop laughing and read more over here, here and here.
Under questioning by Assistant District Attorney Joshua Steinglass, Davidson went over the nondisclosure agreement he helped draw up for Daniels. Steinglass was gingerly trying to ask Davidson if Stormy’s agreement was a lie when she signed it to collect $130,000 or now, in court.
But it was what he said under cross-examination by Trump’s attorney that appears to have left Stormy in even more legal jeopardy than she was before.
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Fox reported:
The ex-lawyer of adult film actress Stormy Daniels testified Thursday that he thought Donald Trump was ”going to lose“ the 2016 presidential election, and pressed Trump’s ex-lawyer Michael Cohen to settle the payment before losing ”leverage.”
During the final rounds of questioning to Daniel’s lawyer, Keith Davidson, he admitted he spoke to Cohen, pressing him to settle the $130,000 payment to Daniels to quiet her claims of an alleged extramarital affair she had with Trump in 2006, before the 2016 election. He said Trump ”will lose“, and subsequently his client would lose her leverage. Trump has denied ever having the affair.
Of course, in the NDA, Daniels ascribed her being seen with Trump to some PR appearances in his heyday when he hosted “The Celebrity Apprentice.”
This shows that Davidson reached out to Trump’s attorney, Michael Cohen, to press him for money before the 2016 election because he, like the rest of the Pauline Kael Manhattanites, just knew Trump wouldn’t win. He wanted to shake him down for money sooner because he knew he would ”lose leverage“ after he lost.
Matt reported that Davidson denied on the stand that he and his client removed the foundation for the proposition that the payment was ”hush money.“ It was a ”consideration,“ he insisted. “It wasn’t a payoff. And it wasn’t hush money. It was a consideration,” he testified.
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Where does this leave us in this third week of this ”spellbinder“ of a case?
- The 34 counts of fraud are actually not hush money
- Demanding payment was an extortive attempt to shake down Trump before the election that Trump was expected to lose
- Cohen admits he paid it, and that Trump didn’t initiate the overture.
- Trump paid Cohen for legal fees, which they were
- They weren’t FEC violations.
The left is praying for guilty verdicts. To get those, the Biden DOJ sent their #3 man to New York Attorney General Letitia James’ office to help her Get Trump on the bank loans case and then migrated him over to Bragg’s office to Get Trump in this case.
The game of tennis has an expression that describes what happened on Thursday: Game set, and match.
Will the jury notice?