Tag: trump prosecutions
Thank You, Stormy Daniels -- For Letting Us See Trump Being Trump

Thank You, Stormy Daniels -- For Letting Us See Trump Being Trump

It wasn’t a crime to meet a woman who acts in pornographic movies at a golf tournament. It wasn’t a crime to hit her up, so to speak, and invite her to have dinner later with you at your hotel. It wasn’t a crime to have failed to inform her that the dinner would be in your hotel room. It wasn’t a crime to greet her at the door in a pair of satin pajamas. It wasn’t a crime that you changed into regular clothes when she teased you about trying to imitate the lifestyle of Hugh Hefner

Chatting with the woman about her profession in the porn trade, it wasn’t even a crime to dangle the suggestion that she would make a good contestant on your hit television show, The Apprentice, as your quid for a yet unspoken quo. That’s the way a lot of business opportunities happen – you meet someone, you get to know them a little, and it occurs to you that they would be a good fit in your business endeavor.

The case could be made that it was all just banter between two adults getting to know one another. That is what Donald Trump’s lawyer, Susan Necheles, was attempting to do in cross-examining Stormy Daniels on Friday morning. She set the scene:

There was Stormy Daniels in Donald Trump’s hotel room, taking a moment to use the bathroom to freshen up. When Daniels comes out of the bathroom, the lawyer states, she was a woman who “acted and had sex in over 200 porn movies, right?”

“Right,” answered Stormy Daniels.

“And there are naked men and naked women having sex in those movies?”

“Correct.”

“But according to you, seeing a man sitting on a bed in a T-shirt and boxers was so upsetting, you became light-headed and almost fainted?”

“Yes,” answered Daniels. “When you’re not expecting a man twice your age, yes.”

She didn’t have to spell it out for the lawyer, or the judge, or the press and public attending the trial. It was the moment she knew that all the banter about The Apprentice and whether there were unions in the pornographic film business, all of it had been leading up to the moment when she realized that Trump intended to have sex with her whether she wanted to or not.

Everyone could fill in the blanks. You don’t sit on a bed in your underwear waiting for a woman, any woman, to come out of the bathroom unless you assume that she is going to have sex with you. Not want to have sex with you. Not agree to have sex with you. Because you want to have sex with her.

Trump’s lawyer put it quite inartfully: because this was a woman who has acted in more than 200 pornographic movies with “naked men and naked women having sex,” the reasonable assumption by her client was that the woman would now have sex with him because he was Donald Trump.

See, there’s the gap in this whole thing – the yawning chasm that exists not just between Donald Trump and Stormy Daniels, but between Donald Trump and every woman in the world. Trump thought he could push E. Jean Carroll up against the wall in a dressing room and sexually assault her. He thought he could grope a woman who just happened to be sitting next to him on a flight across the country. He thought he could do the same thing to a woman sitting next to him in a restaurant. According to women who came forward to tell their stories in 2016, he sexually harassed and assaulted more than 25 women over the previous 30 years.

He's been doing it all his life, exploiting the gap between his privilege and everyone he comes in contact with, but especially women. What was it he said to interviewer Billy Bush on the famous Access Hollywood tapes? “So just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ‘em by the pussy. You can do anything.”

Those are the unspoken words at the Trump trial on Friday -- unspoken by Trump’s attorney as she did her cross-examination. The words were not spoken when Stormy Daniels answered questions. And of course, those words were not spoken by Donald Trump as he sat at the defense table, and they will remain unspoken throughout the rest of the trial until the jury is dismissed to begin its deliberations. Trump knows what happened between himself and Stormy Daniels in a Lake Tahoe hotel room 18 years ago because he knows what has happened between himself and women for his entire life.

You can do anything.

He stripped down to his boxer shorts and t-shirt while she was in the bathroom because “you can do anything.” He had sex with her because “you can do anything.” He paid her off and bought her silence in the final days before the 2016 presidential election because “you can do anything.” He falsified his New York state financial reports to conceal that pay off because “you can do anything.”

So-called consensual sex between adults is not a crime, but every functioning brain cell in every human brain in that courtroom on Friday, including Trump’s female attorney, knew the truth. Donald Trump’s crime is his assumption that he can do anything and get away with it because he is Donald Trump.

Trump’s lawyer seemed to think that because Daniels was “acting” in pornographic films, that the sex wasn’t real. “So, you have a lot of experience in making phony stories about sex seem real,” the lawyer asked her, clearly not expecting the answer she got from Daniels: “The sex in the films, it’s very much real. Just like what happened to me in that room.”

In fact, in the motion picture business, everything that happens on screen is fake – the laughter, the tears, the blanks fired by guns, the car wrecks – everything, that is, except the sex in pornographic films, because the sex act in porn can’t be faked. The sex act is what porn is about. It’s what viewers pay for.

Donald Trump didn’t think about any of this because Donald Trump assumes that he can do anything he wants. Now in a Manhattan courtroom, he is being made to sit in a chair and listen to what he did. The crime he is charged with isn’t the sex, it’s the pay-off, in a kind of backhanded bookkeeping way. But quintessentially, Trump’s crime is his attitude. He is on trial for being Donald Trump and acting like Donald Trump has always acted, and it’s driving him crazy.

Thank you, Stormy Daniels. Thank you.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this is reprinted with permission.


'Deny, Deny, Deny' Is No Longer Working So Well For Donald Trump

'Deny, Deny, Deny' Is No Longer Working So Well For Donald Trump

What was adult film star Stormy Daniels doing on the stand for a second day in a criminal trial about Donald Trump falsifying New York state business records? She may have been called by the prosecution, but it was Trump’s lawyers who put her there, Judge Juan Merchan said.

The exchange came in a hearing after testimony on Friday when Merchan denied a second motion for a mistrial by the defense based on prejudicial testimony by Stormy Daniels. Merchan took time to tell Trump’s lawyers that he went back over Stormy’s testimony on Tuesday, as well as their opening statement. “You denied that there was ever a sexual encounter between Stormy Daniels and the defendant,” Merchan told Todd Blanche, Trump’s lead attorney, so it was the defense that opened the door to her testimony and the “messy details” they object to, such as her statement that Trump refused to wear a condom during sex.

Additionally, Merchan found that the defense did not object to the “messy details” when they were revealed in direct testimony during questioning by the prosecution, so the testimony they failed to object to cannot now be used as grounds for a mistrial. Judge Merchan even said he could not figure “why on earth” Trump’s lawyer, Susan Necheles, had not objected to the question that elicited the “messy detail” about the missing condom.

Friday’s testimony by Stormy Daniels did not go well for the defense. Trump lawyer Necheles spent nearly an hour comparing and contrasting Daniels’ testimony on Tuesday with interviews she had given previously, like the one she gave to gossip magazine In Touch in 2010. She accused Daniels of making up the story about sex with Trump in the Lake Tahoe hotel in 2006. Daniels replied that if she had made it up, “I would have written it to be a lot better.” In another exchange, Necheles challenged Daniels about her account of the sex with Trump saying that as a porn actress, “You have a lot of experience in making phony stories about sex appear to be real.”

Daniels responded that “the sex in the films is very much real, just like what happened to me in that room.” That ended that line of questioning.

Another line of questioning that went flat was when Necheles challenged Daniels about how she had monetized her relationship with Trump by writing a book and selling a votive candle with an illustration of herself depicted as a saint. Daniels responded that her attempts to make money with branded products and her strip club tour were “not unlike Mr. Trump,” bringing that line of questioning to a quick close. The prosecution later called two publishing executives to read into the record from Trump’s books his claims of how much money he made monetizing the Trump brand and how he vowed to always exact revenge on anyone who “betrayed” him, clearly implying that Daniels was Trump’s victim, not the other way around.

The unasked question that hung over the courtroom throughout the testimony of Stormy Daniels and during Judge Merchan’s denial of Trump’s motion for a mistrial was, if Trump didn’t have sex with Stormy Daniels in 2006 in a Lake Tahoe hotel room, why did he have his lawyer pay her $130,000 and have her sign a non-disclosure agreement about what happened between them?

Until the trial for the lawsuit filed by E. Jean Carroll in which the judge found that under common definitions of the term, Donald Trump had raped her, and this trial, when Stormy Daniels has been able to get her story about her sexual encounter with Trump on the permanent record, Trump has gotten away with his practice of “deny, deny, deny.”

This time, by causing his lawyers to “deny, deny, deny” that he had a sexual encounter with Stormy Daniels, he exposed the truth not only to the world, but to a Manhattan jury that will now have to decide who to believe: Donald Trump, who has relied on his lawyers to deny the story, or a very smart and credible witness who parried every attempt by those same lawyers to poke holes in her story.

The prosecution is nearing the end of its case. They will call a few more witnesses to establish the facts of how Trump falsified his business records, and then they will call his former lawyer, Michael Cohen. Jurors have already heard an audio tape of Trump and Cohen discussing making a payoff to Playboy model Karen McDougal, and Cohen is sure to be a deadly witness who will provide more details of the payoff to Stormy Daniels.

Maybe Michael Cohen will answer the question about why Trump found it necessary to pay off Stormy Daniels to buy her silence, because it’s a sure thing that a stone-faced and silent Donald Trump won’t take the stand to do it.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this is reprinted with permission.

Stephen Miller's Latest Loony Claims Of Trump's Immunity From Prosecution

Stephen Miller's Latest Loony Claims Of Trump's Immunity From Prosecution

You’re going to love this: the latest brief in the Mar-a-Lago documents case came from Stephen Miller. Yes, that Stephen Miller, the one who came up with the plan of ripping babies out of the arms of their mothers at the Southern Border. He still defends it as a good idea and has given interviews saying there are plans to repeat the policy of breaking up families if Trump is elected in November.

Miller has another wonderful idea this time -- that it was just fine for Donald Trump to leave the White House in 2021 taking a truckload of top-secret documents with him, because they were Trump’s secrets, not the government’s. Miller’s right-wing legal operation, the America First Legal Foundation – old Stevie just can’t get away from those intimations of the Nazi era, can he? – filed a friend of the court brief with Judge Aileen Cannon down in Florida supporting Trump’s position that the Presidential Records Act (PRA) allows him to do whatever the hell he wants to with his White House papers.

The PRA allows no such thing. The act, passed by Congress after the criminal presidency of Richard Nixon, requires every president to turn over all papers deriving from his time in office to the National Archives. Miller’s little nest of right-wing legal mice say the PRA doesn’t apply to Donald Trump because, well, because Donald Trump says so.

It's a little more complicated than that, but not by much. Special Counsel Jack Smith filed a reply brief to Miller’s 28 pages of legal blatherings. Leaving aside its signature page and certificate of service, Smith’s reply brief is all of five pages long. Smith uses a single word to describe the three contentions of Miller’s legal arguments: Wrong.

Reading the Special Counsel’s brief, you can feel him wearying of replying to Trump’s blizzard of filings in the cases Smith has against him in Washington and Florida. Trump’s basic position, backed up most recently by his loyal underling Miller, is this: Yeah, I did it, but you can’t get me because I’m Donald Trump.

Miller’s brief supporting Trump takes the utterly absurd position that the charges against him in the Mar a Lago case must be dropped because they all derive from a criminal referral by the National Archives, which spent 18 months practically begging Trump to turn over his trove of secrets before they called the FBI. Miller’s legal brief says the National Archives can’t call the FBI because all they are is a records depository and don’t have the statutory authority to report a crime. According to Miller’s MAGA theory, the National Archives needs a “regulation” to be allowed to pick up the phone and report a crime.

Smith, with Job-like patience, points out that if Miller is right, that means if a thief enters the National Archives and starts waving a gun around, it would be impermissible for the Archives to call the cops. Smith’s brief points Judge Cannon to the fact that the National Archives, as an entity of the federal government, has an inspector general on its staff, and by federal regulation, all inspector generals are “required to report expeditiously to the Attorney General whenever the Inspector General has reasonable grounds to believe there has been a violation of Federal criminal law.”

The Special Counsel has had to file response after response to motions made by Donald Trump to dismiss charges against him, and every one of those motions takes the same position. Yeah, he did it, but this is why you can’t go after him. He’s immune from prosecution. The prosecution is “selective and vindictive.” Because everybody else got away with it, so should Trump.

Trump is accused in the Mar-a-Lago case of removing important national security information from the White House and failing to secure it by storing top-secret papers, including some that contained secrets about nuclear weapons, in places like a bathroom and a ballroom. But that’s okay, according to Trump’s lawyers, because according to yet another case against Trump, “the President’s actions do not fall beyond the outer perimeter of official responsibility merely because they are unlawful or taken for a forbidden purpose.”

Judge Tanya Chutkan had it right when she dismissed Trump’s first claim of absolute immunity. What he wants is a get of out jail free card. Reelecting Trump will give him a whole pocketful. Every time he holds a rally, he promises to free “the January 6 hostages” with presidential pardons.

That’s bad enough, but what we’ve really got to be afraid of is his promise to turn around and put his enemies in jail. At his rallies, “lock her up” has turned into a chant of “lock them up.”

Remember, we are them.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this is reprinted with permission.

Shop our Store

Headlines

Editor's Blog

Corona Virus

Trending

World