Alan Dershowitz Testimony, Gives Trump Good News
Conservative legal scholar Alan Dershowitz brutally summed up Stormy Daniels’ first day on the witness stand, calling her testimony a “clear reversible error” that could lead a guilty verdict to be overturned on appeal.
The Harvard Law School professor described how such a scenario could occur based on the recent overturning of the New York conviction of disgraced film mogul and rapist Harvey Weinstein. The only issue she should have talked about, Dershowitz claimed, is “whether she threatened to expose” President Donald Trump “and whether she extorted him and whether he then paid money to avoid an embarrassment to his family, to his business, to his children.”
“The issue of what actually happened is utterly irrelevant, and then we get to the details: the silk pajamas, the kind of lotion he was wearing,” he continued. “I can’t imagine how the Court of Appeals in New York that reversed the Harvey Weinstein conviction, which was a harder case to reverse, wouldn’t reverse this conviction if it got up there.”
A New York state appeals court ruled last month that Harvey Weinstein is entitled to a new trial, criticizing a lower court’s decision to allow some witnesses with no connection to the trial to provide horrific stories about their experiences with Weinstein behind closed doors.
“We conclude that the trial court erroneously admitted testimony of uncharged, alleged prior sexual acts against persons other than the complainants of the underlying crimes,” the court’s 4-3 decision said according to the AP. “The remedy for these egregious errors is a new trial. It is an abuse of judicial discretion to permit untested allegations of nothing more than bad behavior that destroys a defendant’s character but sheds no light on their credibility as related to the criminal charges lodged against them.”
Throughout Daniels’ testimony, President Trump either shut his eyes, shook his head, or whispered furiously to his lawyers, prompting Judge Juan Merchan at one point to call his attorney to the bench and ask him to prevent Trump from making further gestures that could impact the jury. Daniels provided intimate details about her encounter with Trump, ones that left a female juror covering her face and looking away while she spoke.
“I would certainly recommend to the prosecutors in this case they study the Weinstein decision very carefully because it’s a roadmap to what you can’t do,” Dershowitz added. President Trump’s attorneys have already called into question the character of Daniels, who admitted she “hates” Trump during cross-examination.
“Her responses were disastrous. I mean, ‘Do you hate Donald Trump?’ Yes, of course, she does,” attorney Eli Honig explained during a CNN panel. “That‘s a big deal. When the witness hates the person who‘s liberty is at stake, that‘s a big damn deal. And she‘s putting out tweets, fantasizing about him being in jail. That really undermines the credibility.” Attorneys for Trump also questioned her about past public statements where she refused to abide by a court order to pay the former president $500,000 for bringing a meritless lawsuit against him in 2018.
