Andrea Bernstein:
Right. Right. That’s right.
I mean, the details of the encounter that Stormy Daniels laid out did sync up with what other witnesses have testified, down from sort of Trump calling her honey bunch, to the contact that she made through his executive assistant, Rhona Graff. We had heard from Rhona Graff. She had acknowledged that she’d seen Stormy Daniels in Trump Tower, entered a contact for her.
But what the defense wanted to lean into is all of the contradictory accounts that Stormy Daniels has given since this happened. And those are out there. She obviously denied the story for a long time, put a toe in the water about selling it in 2011, drew back, then made this NDA with Trump, or with Cohen, on behalf of Trump, as she understood it, in 2016, during the campaign.
She testified how anxious she was that he would never pay her and she’d have essentially no leverage after the campaign. But the defense just wanted to dwell on all of the contradictory accounts, that she’d, in fact, hated Trump, that she owed him money from an unsuccessful defamation suit she tried to bring against him.
And this all came up. And it’s going to be for the jury to sort out whether all of those contradictory counts overwhelm the other testimony corroborated about what she says happened in 2006 and then how she made this deal with the Trump campaign or with Trump through Michael Cohen in late — in — late in the campaign in 2016.
