After the hectic testimony that Stormy Daniels offered on Tuesday for five hours, the statement of the main witness in the first criminal case against a former president of the United States has found this Thursday, when responding to the attacks by Donald Trump’s lawyers, the resoundingness that According to some, he missed the day before (there is no session on Wednesdays). Daniels, the adult film actress who has managed to put Trump in court for the 130,000 dollars (about 120,000 euros), which he paid her in 2016 to buy her silence for an affair that occurred years before, has responded bluntly, with a more than audible “no” to the most anticipated question of the process: “You made all this up, right?” And she did it with more poise, or perhaps fierceness, than in the previous session, when her speed in talking about herself put even the stenotypists in trouble.
At Stormy Daniels’ appearance, above all, control of the story was at stake. Defense attorneys have tried to portray her as lying about the Republican’s alleged extramarital affair in 2006. “They’re trying to make me say she’s changed, but she hasn’t changed,” Daniels replied. If on Tuesday she had to answer the prosecution’s questions, facing the interrogation of the lawyers of the person who may become president of the United States again in November seemed to leave Daniels exhausted, but not without arguments.
His testimony, lasting more than seven hours between Tuesday and Thursday, has been, by far, the most anticipated spectacle of a trial that oscillates between elements taken from a tabloid – Trump’s extramarital affair, the help of an editor friend to silence with a checkbook any shocking revelation about her figure—and the arid details of the accounting record that recorded as “legal expenses” the $130,000 paid to the actress in 2006, and whose disclosure, in the final stretch of the electoral campaign of 2016, threatened to blow up his expectations of victory at the polls. As a result of the gruesome and accounting details, the most difficult element of the story is added: the possible violation of electoral financing laws for that payment, which had no other objective than to eliminate obstacles for Trump’s path to the White House. .
In the trial, Judge Juan Merchan recalled, the private behavior of two adults was not judged, although on Tuesday he asked the witness to avoid certain intimate details. The same ones that made the defense ask, for the first time in the three weeks of the process, the annulment of the trial, since the information provided by Daniels about the meeting with Trump “is a place from which there is no return”, that is, a scenario from which it is difficult to turn back.
But his attempt to prove that Daniels is a liar and that she fabricated the story for money did not deter the woman, who in the two consecutive days of testimony has oscillated between defiance and vulnerability. “You made it all up, right?” a Trump lawyer asked, to which Daniels responded with a resounding “No.” And when the lawyer suggested that the porn actress had experience with “false stories about sex,” she responded that the sex in those movies is “very real, just like what happened to me in that room.” A room, in a hotel in Lake Tahoe, in Nevada, from which she said she left staggering after her experience with a man much larger than her and who at that time was 60 years old (she, 27).
Coming out more or less unscathed by the inquisitorial defense is a merit, and Daniels has even been defiant this Thursday, even when the defense attacked her for selling products to her followers and she responded by comparing her business to Trump’s marketing, which in the In recent weeks it has sold everything from a Bible to gold-colored sports shoes. At times in a low voice, apparently on the verge of tears, she then re-emerged as a strong and determined woman, although she confessed that the sexual episode with Trump, and everything that has derived from it – the trial itself as a subsequent consequence -, It has forced her to live in exceptional conditions, having to hire security, move house several times and take additional precautions to protect her daughter. Asked whether publicly telling the truth about that 2006 meeting had been a positive or negative thing for her, she responded: “Negative.”
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The biggest blows against Daniels came from another woman, Susan Necheles, of Trump’s legal team, who spent more than two hours Thursday trying to undermine Daniels’ credibility, including her reasons for accepting the hush money payment. Necheles, as her defense colleagues did on Tuesday, presented Daniels at all times as a liar driven by greed, something the witness denied, although she acknowledged having accepted the offer of Michael Cohen, then Trump’s lawyer and confidant. , and that he took charge of the management, because he was “running out of time,” in an apparent reference to the imminent elections, which brought Trump to the White House.
The payment is the crux of the case: the 34 serious crimes of falsifying business records that have been charged against Trump stem from his repayment of money to Cohen when he was already in the White House, in addition to the record of the checks given to the lawyer as “legal expenses” at the Trump Organization, the name of the family emporium. Trump, 77, has denied any wrongdoing, as well as the alleged sexual encounter with Daniels. If he is convicted, he could face prison sentences or probation with no prior record.
After Stormy Daniels, the next testimony was that of Rebecca Manochio, a junior accountant at the Trump Organization, who described how during the Republican’s presidency, he sent her checks that needed her signature, even though the business was already theoretically in the hands of her older children to avoid a conflict of interest. Manochio said she worked directly under Jeffrey S. McConney, the Trump Organization’s corporate controller who previously testified at trial that most of Trump’s refunds to Cohen came from the president’s personal bank account.
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