Former President Donald Trump on Friday railed against the effort to prosecute him in Manhattan’s hush money case. While addressing reporters outside of the courtroom, he read a series of news stories and op-eds criticizing the judge and the prosecution’s case against the former president.
Trump called the case “highly unconstitutional” and said it is “presided over by a very conflicted judge, conflicted like I’ve never seen before.” He went on, reading excerpts from various reports and columns about the case.
"He refuses to take himself off the case, and it should be a mistrial. Their objective, of course, is to humiliate and smear Trump with a gossipy tale of sex that had nothing to do with the criminal charges at issue. Had nothing to do with it. Everything you've been watching has nothing to do with the case. They know that. It was a sophomoric, a gamble, and it has backfired, fired spectacularly. Miranda Devine, we've heard it all before."
The former president took aim at Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, saying he “should be spending his time prosecuting cop bashers and Jew-hating agitators” and asserted that those seeking to prosecute him “are cheating to beat me.” He characterized the prosecution effort as “election interference.”
The former president claimed the proceedings are “not going well for [the] prosecution” and noted that “these are all stories that are 100 percent that this is a disgraceful trial.”
Trump, at various moments during his remarks, indicated that he has to be careful about which parts of the excerpts he reads due to Judge Juan Merchan’s gag order restricting his ability to use certain rhetoric toward people involved in the case. “I can’t read certain words,” Trump said. “I’m not allowed to read – if I use the words, this guy wants to put me in jail. He’s corrupt.”
Later, he reiterated that if he mentions “the wrong word, they’ll come out here, and they’ll take me out to jail someplace because that’s the way it is with this judge.”
The former president concluded his comments by characterizing the trial as “a tremendous abuse of the New York judicial system in particular” and saying that this system “has been absolutely abused and abused terribly.”
The judge recently held Trump in contempt for violating the gag order and issued a series of fines for each violation. Merchan appears hesitant to jail the former president but has threatened to do so if he determines there are further gag order violations.
On Thursday, the court heard further testimony from adult film actress Stormy Daniels, who is alleged to have had a sexual encounter with Trump well over a decade ago.
Daniels was back on the stand Thursday for further cross-examination by Trump's legal team. She is...something. Here are some highlights (lowlights?) from Thursday's testimony:
Attempting to paint the adult film actor as not only an irrelevant witness but also an unreliable one, Trump attorney Susan Necheles — the only woman defending Trump at trial — tore into Daniels over the profit she’s made since alleging an affair with Trump, which he has denied happened.
Across three hours of questioning over two days, the defense attorney insinuated Daniels’s work in porn made her ready to cash in.
“You have a lot of experience in making phony stories about sex appear to be real, correct?” Necheles asked Thursday.
With an indignant laugh, Daniels said that’s not how she would put it.
“I have experience memorizing dialogue, not how to have sex. … Pretty sure we all know how to do that,” she retorted.
Circling back moments later to her accusations about Trump, Daniels quipped, “And if that story was untrue, I would’ve written it to be a lot better.”
Trump’s defense attorneys earlier this week asked the judge — twice — to grant a mistrial due to the salacious details of Daniels’ testimony that did nothing to prove the prosecution’s allegations that Trump misclassified business records. Predictably, Merchan rejected the requests.
READ MORE:
Join the conversation as a VIP Member