Lawrence O’Donnell opened Tuesday’s episode of “The Last Word” with a detailed look at Stormy Daniels’ testimony in Donald Trump’s New York criminal trial earlier in the day.
And the MSNBC host concluded things went pretty bad for Trump, because based on comments he made during the trial, presiding judge Juan Merchan sent “a signal” to the ex-president that his defense attorneys “did not do a good job in that section of the trial.”
You can watch the full commentary at the top of the page now. Of note, O’Donnell listed all the events, including the fact that Trump was threatened again with jail time for contempt because he was audibly cursing in court, which seemed to freak his lawyer, Todd Blanche, out. Lawrence also described Daniels’ testimony, which brought him to how Blanche attempted, at Trump’s direction, to have a mistrial declared because of it.
O’Donnell focused on how Blanche said Daniels’ testimony was “extraordinarily prejudicial and you can’t unring that bell for the jury.”
“The judge noted that he sustained almost all of the Trump attorney’s objections to that testimony,” O’Donnell added, “and then said in a very direct, professional insult to the Trump lawyers, quote, ‘I was surprised that there were not more objections.’ That was a signal to Donald Trump that his lawyers did not do a good job in that section of the trial.”
He then described some of how Trump’s attorneys defended him, noting that one of them, Susan Necheles, wasted her time on “a full hour of flat, unrevealing question-and-answer before ever getting to Stormy Daniels’ testimony about having sex with Donald Trump.”
O’Donnell further explained how Necheles “used the word pornography several times to describe what Stormy Daniels does for a living.” That led to the point where the attorney accused Daniels of attempting to extort Trump, which set Daniels up to simply answer “false,” which, O’Donnell suggested, worked out poorly ahead of Daniels’ continued testimony on Thursday.
