Per Some Guy on CNN [paraphrased]: ‘The prosecution needed to bring a Hemmingway story. Instead, they brought Tolstoy.’
and here we go.
back in, per cnn:
He starts:
“Four weeks before the election the campaign was rocked to its core” with the release of the Access Hollywood tape.
Prosecutor Joshua Steinglass notes that former Trump aide Hope Hicks testified that the news of the “Access Hollywood” tape “was so explosive, it eclipsed the coverage of a Category 4 hurricane.”
“So I guess it was a Category 5 hurricane,” he says of the tape.
Steinglass is showing the jury the transcript of the tape and highlighting the graphic language Trump used.
“The video was vulgar to say the least” Steinglass says.
I’m surprised at the references to the jury being able to influence the timetable. Is this common? I would’ve thought the jury would be there when the judge told them to be there.
FWIW, CNN today has been extremely invested in Trump being found “not guilty”. I’m sure there’s a business reason why this is, but it’s offputting.
The judge has been pretty accommodating for the jury’s personal appointments and has delayed trial dates over them, so this seems consistent. And it comes across to me as him making sure they’re okay with breaking from the regular schedule of being off on Wednesday since previously he’d been giving them that break.
Essentially, are you okay with putting in extra time to get this all over with faster. Seems cool to me.
The judge gets to decide and he decided to defer to them.
It was common enough where I worked. Judges would often allow jurors to confer and agree re scheduling to some extent. Things like what they’ve agreed to today – stay late tonight and finish with closing? – happened frequently.
ETA: We as court staff rather hated it, because you’re screwed if you have plans of your own. I worked for judges who would ask us first before making any offer to the jury. But we tried to accommodate the judge’s wishes as often as we could.
per cnn:
Joshua Steinglass plays a clip of Donald Trump’s video responding to the “Access Hollywood” tape, as well as a timeline showing text messages in the fallout, including communications between Michael Cohen and Hope Hicks, Steve Bannon and David Pecker.
It wasn’t in New York, obviously, but when I was on a jury some 35 or so years ago, we made our own timetable once the matter was in our hands. One night, we deliberated until 11 pm, for example.
Now, we were sequestered in a hotel, and had a conference room, so it wasn’t like we were in a courthouse. We could do that sort of thing in more comfortable surroundings.
But I wouldn’t be surprised to find that New York works the same way: once the matter is in the jury’s hands, they do their thing on their schedule. If the jury wants to convene on Wednesday (assuming the matter is in their hands), they can.
msnbc just reported that at 5 pm the judge will check in with the jury on what they want to do.
as team nyc is at the access hollywood time line, i would think they would be about 2 hours to go…
I wonder if the jury is also given extra leeway per the schedule because of the necessity to keep them anonymous? Firstly, there is an inherent risk in being a juror on this trial so that should at least demand some extra consideration. Secondly, it might be a bit difficult for a juror to explain to someone why they are unavailable for something. Let’s say I was a juror who had a friend’s birthday meal that evening. How could I explain why I couldn’t make it?
Interesting comment on CNN from a prosecutor (not on this case, but a lawyer with some insight and opinion).
She recalled a taping of “The Apprentice” where Trump interrupted, and started telling a producer how to do his job. “Leave that line in, take that line out,” sort of thing.
She was illustrating how hands-on Trump likes to be. Micromanaging everything. Her point was that if he was that much of a hands-on micromanager on “The Apprentice,” then it follows that he would be in this matter too. He cannot say that he was unaware of anything.
Sequestered? That’s wild. Isn’t that pretty rare? Would you mind sharing the story?
I don’t know if it was done to keep anyone anonymous, but near the beginning, IIRC, they took a day off because someone had a dentist appointment. There may have been one or two other things as well.
They are allowed to say they are on a jury. Any of their co-workers or close friends know because it’s obvious.
A friend of mine local to me was on jury duty for weeks. Given how long he was on jury duty, it could only have been this one particular murder trial.
per cnn:
Prosecutor Joshua Steinglass is going back through all of the details. He is showing the jury once again Trump’s comments at an October 2016 rally in North Carolina, where he denies a story about women alleging misconduct.
“Stormy Daniels was a walking, talking reminder that the defendant was not only words,” prosecutor Joshua Steinglass says.
“She would have totally undermined (Donald Trump’s) strategy for spinning away the ‘Access Hollywood’ tape,” he says.
Prosecutor Joshua Steinglass is now walking through how things changed for publicist Gina Rodriguez trying to sell her client Stormy Daniels’ story when the “Access Hollywood” tape came out.
Steinglass is going through texts between National Enquirer editor Howard and Rodriguez in the hours after the tape went public.
Steinglass argues that part of the reason the “extortion narrative is so bogus” is because the negotiations happened between Howard and Rodriguez about AMI buying the story, and did not involve Cohen or Trump at all when Daniels’ manager thought that AMI would buy the story.
Prosecutor Joshua Steinglass now skips quickly through slides showing messages and call records during a two-week stretch when Michael Cohen gave “a barrage of excuses” to Keith Davidson to put off paying Stormy Daniels from October 12 to 26, 2016.
Prosecutor Joshua Steinglass is now showing the false paperwork Michael Cohen provided on October 13, 2016, to First Republic Bank about Resolution Consultants LLC, the first LLC Cohen said he opened up to facilitate payments.
Steinglass tells the jury that Cohen falsified the business record to open the bank account.
Blanche told the jury there’s no proof beyond Cohen’s words that Trump knew anything about any of those records or Cohen’s activities.
Prosecutor Joshua Steinglass is now walking through more phone calls as the negotiations over the deal briefly fell apart.
He is ticking through various phone conversations, including, he notes, rare calls on the weekend involving Michael Cohen and Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg.
Steinglass appears to have quickened his pace flipping quickly though pages of phone logs and messages that prosecutors say reveal the timeline of the scheme unfolding. He’s told the panel a few times since the mid-afternoon break that they’ll have access to the evidence during deliberations if they want to read the exhibits more closely.
Joshua Steinglass continues to quickly skim through Michael Cohen’s call log.
“Again, I’m not going to try to bore you with every single record here,” the prosecutor says.
He notes there were “six calls in three years between” Cohen and Trump Organization CFO Alan Weisselberg.
“Well, two of them happened the three days leading up to the Stormy Daniels payment,” Steinglass says.
Prosecutor Joshua Steinglass is pointing to a call between Michael Cohen and Trump that lasted three minutes, records show. The call came before Cohen went across the street to the bank to open the account that would complete the wire transfer to Daniel’s attorney.
“This is damning right here,” he says of the call.
Steinglass now shows jurors again the bank records that Cohen submitted to open an account for Essential Consultants LLC, which he notes was false, claiming it was a real estate consulting company.
The jury is now seeing a record for the wire transfer from Michael Cohen to Keith Davidson calling the $130,000 payment a retainer.
The prosecutor says, “This wasn’t a retainer, it was a pay-off.”
“Now it’s true that Mr. Trump didn’t sign these documents himself. That’s kind of the whole point,” Steinglass says.
Steinglass notes that the day Cohen signed the wire transfer document, October 28, Cohen had a call with Trump.
I cannot speak to the rarity, but here we go …
This was in Toronto. I was on a coroner’s jury in Coroner’s Court. Basically, the idea is that somebody dies, and while the autopsy is over, there are still questionable circumstances to be determined. That’s what Coroner’s Court is for, and it was our job to determine those circumstances and make recommendations so it doesn’t happen again.
In our case, it was a mental patient who decided to commit suicide by drinking muriatic acid. Then she changed her mind. The doctor in charge tried his best, but nothing suitable was local. They all jumped in an ambulance and headed south to Toronto, which had necessary facilities (they were a two hour drive north of Toronto), the doctor working the radio the whole time trying to find someplace to take the woman. Sadly, there wasn’t—all the trauma facilities in Toronto were full. In the end, it didn’t matter; the woman died during the ride.
There was a lot more to it, including remarks made by the provincial Minister of Health in the Ontario Legislature, but those are the facts in a nutshell. Our job was to determine whether the doctor had done the right thing, and what could be done to prevent a recurrence.
That’s what made it a big deal, and it received extensive media coverage. I could see myself in the courtroom sketches on the TV news nightly. There were a parade of witnesses: doctors, politicians, even the store clerk who had sold the acid to the woman. Media all over the place: cameras, microphones, print reporters taking notes, and so on. That may have been why we were sequestered for deliberations. Media knew that we were to be left alone.
Note that during regular days, with testimony happening, we just went home at the end of the day. Sequestration in the hotel, in our case, was only during deliberations. We were warned that on the last day of testimony, we should bring some luggage to get us through the next few days.
The hotel was nice, and only a couple of blocks away from the courthouse. A court officer looked after us, calling for room service, and so on. In all our rooms, the phones were disconnected (pre-cellphone days); the only phone that worked was in the hands of the Officer
When we delivered our findings and recommendations to the court, our job was over. But that meant we were fair game for the media. The officer suggested that we leave by the back door of the courthouse; there shouldn’t be any media there. But there were, and it was obvious they were not going to leave us alone. So we held an impromptu press conference (I was the spokesman), fielded some questions, and when the media got what they wanted, we all went for a drink or three.
It was an experience. But that’s pretty much the story.
Interesting point here from Maggie Haberman at the NY Times about the “Trump was only concerned about his family” defense:
A lot of the back-and-forth about who called who around the Stormy Daniels payoff felt dizzying, but the jurors have generally seemed quite engaged. And Joshua Steinglass lands his point by saying that while the sex between Daniels and Trump allegedly took place in 2006, the payoff wasn’t until 2016 because his concern wasn’t actually his family, as his lawyers have suggested, but the election.
It’s a simple deductive point that the jurors can likely understand easily.
Judge is open to letting prosecutor’s closing argument go on as late as 8:00 PM. Should be interesting. Trump will undoubtedly fall asleep because that’s way past nappy-time.
Though I definitely get that, and I think the “think of the children” defense rings deafeningly hollow with TFG …
If the threat of these stories coming out, and the impetus for them suddenly being monetized was the 2016 election, then the exposure could have triggered a long-silent threat to his marriage.
Again: I don’t believe that, but I think it could also be reasonably argued.