Fox News legal analyst Jonathan Turley said Tuesday on Fox News Channel’s America Reports that Judge Juan Merchan lost control of the courtroom during Stormy Daniels testimony at former President Donald Trump’s New York business records trial.
Turley said:
You know, the statement of the judge, that he’s surprised there isn’t a higher number of objections from the defense is baffling. The defense objected to putting her on the stand. They then objected to the scope of the questioning, and now the judge sounds like Claude Rains saying I’m shocked, shocked there’s a porn star in my courtroom. Well, you know, if you give a lot of scope to testimony, what did you expect? And the problem with what the judge has done here is that this is an entirely unnecessary witness. It is uncontested that there’s an NDA, whether what happened in their relationship, if there was one, is immaterial to how those payments were denoted by the Trump campaign.
He continued:
So the court had the opportunity repeatedly to say we are not going to take this courtroom through details of this relationship. If you want to establish a relationship occurred, do so. Establish the dates, it’s likely those facts could’ve been been stipulated to. So the prosecutors wanted to get salacious details out. This is a form of punishment. They are trying to use a witness for punitive purposes and in my view, political purposes, and this is what happens. It happened because the judge lost control of his courtroom.
John Roberts said, “There seems to be no argument, Jonathan, that this was only to make Trump look like a bad guy. ”
Turley said, “You know, you really can’t have this cat walk backward. The judge knows that, the prosecutors know that, but what the prosecutors are arguing here is completely ridiculous.”
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