Looks like Donald Trump’s “day off” backfired on him in this trial
Judge Juan Merchan was being kind when he granted Donald Trump’s request to have last Friday off so that he could attend his son Barron’s high school graduation. Such requests aren’t automatically granted. But in this instance, the courts weren’t going to be injured by the trial running one day longer, right?
As it turns out, Trump’s defense was apparently injured by the day that he took off. Trump’s defense team spent Thursday trying to rough up Michael Cohen on cross examination by focusing in on the nature of a certain phone call. Cohen said it was when he discussed the Stormy Daniels payoff with Trump. Trump’s lawyers argued that there was no proof of this. Then came the long three day weekend, because Trump wanted Friday off.
Former prosecutor Ron Filipkowski is now arguing that it was the three day weekend that gave prosecutors time to go back and dig up a C-SPAN image of Trump standing next to Keith Schiller at the time he was taking the phone call from Cohen. Sure enough, that image was entered into evidence on Monday, and helped corroborate the most contentious part of Cohen’s testimony.
If Trump hadn’t asked for the day off, Cohen’s cross examination and redirect would have wrapped up on Friday morning, and the prosecution would have rested on Friday before prosecutors managed to track down the photo.
No one believes that Donald Trump really cared about attending Barron’s graduation (he reportedly skipped the graduations of all his other kids), and instead the whole thing appeared to have been an attempt on Trump’s part at making the judge look bad for not initially granting the request. So it’s only fitting that the bad faith request ended up screwing Trump.
