Jonathan Alter
Contributing Opinion Writer
“Sometimes I give too many details,” Stormy Daniels said toward the end of her cross-examination on Thursday at Donald Trump’s criminal trial in New York.
Justice Juan Merchan thought so when he admonished her on Tuesday to keep her answers shorter. And the defense clearly hoped that the difference between the details she included in her testimony and those she included in interviews were harmful to her credibility.
Perhaps. But more likely, Daniels’s propensity for offering TMI — bolstered by easygoing quips that made the jury laugh — kept her basic story and her credibility intact.
Susan Necheles is legendary in New York courtrooms for her cross-examinations and she lacerated Daniels for hours. Daniels was defiant and didn’t give an inch.
Necheles’s best moments came when she trapped Daniels on whether she had eaten dinner with Trump or not. In an interview with In Touch magazine, she said she had talked at length with Trump in the hotel suite “before, during and after” dinner. On Tuesday, Daniels testified that amid the conversation “we never got food.” On Thursday, her excuse was, “I’m very food-motivated and in all of these interviews, I would have talked about the food” if there had been any. So, great, a discrepancy about whether they ate anything.
The defense approach has been to slam everything against the wall and see what stuck. Little else did. Necheles’s efforts to challenge Daniels on a dozen details ran aground in part because the witness had offered hundreds more over two days that the defense didn’t challenge — accounts so detailed they would be hard to make up.
Necheles sneered that because Daniels believed in the paranormal and wrote films, Daniels had a lot of experience in remembering “things that aren’t real.” Daniels replied, “If that story was not true, I would have written it to be a lot better.” Reporters spotted jurors visibly stifling laughs.
For much of the morning, Necheles tried to make Daniels seem like a liar for not admitting that she, for instance, approved the name “The Making America Horny Again Tour.” Again, big whoop. While Daniels was dodgy about the extent of her capitalist impulses, it’s hard to imagine the jury caring.
At one point, Necheles made everyone think she was prepared to blow Daniels sky-high. Daniels had testified that the foyer in Trump’s suite had a black-and-white tile floor. On Tuesday, the judge used the tile floor as an example of Daniels’s being too detailed. When Necheles started pushing hard on what Daniels remembered about the foyer, I was sure the lawyer would produce a décor plan or photo from Harrah’s proving the floor tile was not black-and-white.
She didn’t do so. In the end, it didn’t matter much that Daniels got dinged a bit, or that some of her testimony was slightly at odds with what she told In Touch, Slate and Vogue. Her story came off as believable.
Nicholas Kristof
Opinion Columnist
For seven months, President Biden has called on Israel to show more restraint in its war in Gaza and to allow more aid into the territory, and he has been mostly ignored. Now, belatedly and reluctantly, he is doing what presidents do all over the world: He is applying leverage.
Biden has delayed the transfer of 3,500 bombs to Israel and has warned that an all-out Israeli invasion of the packed southern Gaza city of Rafah would lead to further suspensions in the weapons flow. It was the only way to get the attention of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli leadership.
Republicans have denounced Biden’s move as weakening Israel and impeding its war effort, but the United States is continuing to provide defensive weaponry to Israel. The new moves affect only munitions that would be used to pulverize Rafah and cause thousands more civilian casualties there.
President Ronald Reagan likewise delayed arms shipments after Israel’s reckless invasion of Lebanon in 1982 led to enormous civilian casualties.
As I see it, Biden had to act, for both humanitarian and practical reasons. United Nations agencies have been warning that an invasion of Rafah would result in a catastrophic civilian toll. The United States would be complicit in that blood bath, through the use of American munitions and American backing for the war.
I only wish that Biden had taken such actions months ago. That might have saved the lives of so many Gazan children and prevented people from starving to death as aid flows were constricted.
It’s not clear how Israel will respond. Netanyahu may defy Biden, seeing an invasion of Rafah as his path to staying in power by retaining support from extremist parties in his country.
While Biden’s focus is on preventing an all-out invasion of Rafah, I hope he will also use this leverage to press Israel to allow more aid into the territory. Cindy McCain, the head of the World Food Program, warns that there is already full-blown famine in parts of Gaza, even as trucks with food are lined up outside the Israel-controlled entry points on the border. This is unconscionable.
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David Firestone
Deputy Editor, the Editorial Board
It always feels a little too simplistic to suggest that federal judges deliberately act in the interest of the president who nominated them. Most of them, in fact, do their jobs with integrity and independence. But it’s getting hard to reach any other conclusion about Judge Aileen Cannon in Florida, who on Tuesday essentially blew up the classified-documents trial of the man who gave her the job.
Cannon said the trial of Donald Trump on charges of illegal possession of classified documents would not start on May 20, as she had announced. Then she refused to set an alternative date, delaying the case indefinitely and most likely past the election. The reason she gave was so ludicrous that it gave the game away: There were just too many unresolved legal issues to settle before the case could proceed. Of course, those issues are unresolved because she has somehow failed to resolve them.
After all the favorable rulings she has already provided to Trump, the delay on Tuesday was the final straw for many legal analysts. Several openly accused Cannon of ulterior motives to favor Trump and even advance her career if he wins in November.
“Judge Cannon seems desperate to avoid trying this case,” wrote Joyce Vance, a professor at the University of Alabama law school. “This isn’t justice.”
“Is it too cynical to believe that Judge Cannon timed the announcement of the postponement of a Trump classified documents trial to take away from the salacious sex details from Stormy Daniels’s testimony today?” asked Rick Hasen, a professor at the U.C.L.A. law school.
“After the election, if Trump wins, Jack Smith gets fired, the case gets dismissed, and Judge Cannon is ready for SCOTUS,” wrote Richard Painter, the White House ethics lawyer under George W. Bush, who teaches at the University of Minnesota law school.
This case has long been considered the most straightforward of the four prosecutions of Trump. He clearly took classified documents from the White House to Mar-a-Lago, as the government has demonstrated in great detail, and he then refused to give them back when the government demanded them. Trump’s team, aware of his vulnerability, has tried to argue that there are enormous complexities in the classification of the documents that require months of hearings.
A competent, nonpartisan judge — one like Justice Juan Merchan in the New York hush-money case — would have thrown out that kind of nonsense. A novice political acolyte like Cannon uses it like a wrecking ball.
Gail Collins
Opinion Columnist
It’s taken a while for people to start comparing Donald Trump and Grover Cleveland. Cleveland, of course, was the only man to achieve Trump’s current political goal: win the presidency, lose the re-election and then win it again the third time around.
Both championed tax cuts and fiscal restraint, although only Cleveland actually tried to balance the budget. And both had sex scandals — which we’re going to compare now just because it’s sort of fun.
Cleveland, unlike Trump, was unmarried. He’d never been divorced. And the closest thing he had to a sex scandal before his presidential nomination was a bunch of stories about jolly drinking parties he’d had with his male friends at neighborhood beer gardens.
Trump had — well, really, there’s no point in discussing that, is there? This week in court we’ve been dragged through his entanglement with Stormy Daniels (“He said, ‘Oh it was great. Let’s get together again, honeybunch,’” Daniels testified on Tuesday. “I just wanted to leave.”), which is interesting only now that we’re arguing about whether he illegally disguised the money he used to silence her as legal expenses.
Cleveland, a Democrat, was nominated for president as a virtuous bachelor. Then a story arose about a possible son. There was definitely a child, born to an unmarried woman with a drinking problem. Cleveland looked after the child and eventually arranged to have him adopted.
It took some of the Republican tabloids of the era about two minutes to figure out a spin. “Ma, Ma, where’s my pa?” they roared. (To which the Democrats later replied, “Gone to the White House, ha, ha, ha!”)
Cleveland told his advisers to “tell the truth” in the face of the scandal. This approach succeeded, possibly because many people at the time assumed the child in question was actually the secret offspring of Cleveland’s longtime friend Oscar Folsom, who died not long before in a carriage accident. His daughter, a beautiful college student named Frances, was the secret love of Cleveland’s life.
Jump to the end here: The voters decided they were more interested in Cleveland’s superhonesty in public matters than secret offspring. He married Frances Folsom in the........