Down to the nitty gritty now
This morning I wrote that while Donald Trump’s criminal trial is becoming quite fun for those of us who consider him to be a psychotic monster, we should keep in mind that this trial isn’t meant for entertainment value. The goal isn’t to humiliate Trump, it’s to convict Trump.
We got a reminder of this today when Stormy Daniels, an electric witness who revealed intimate details of her encounter with Trump, was followed by… an executive from Harper Collins book publishing? Yep.
The book publisher took the stand solely to explain how to tell which parts of Trump’s book were written by him and which parts were written by the ghostwriter. This opened the door for the prosecution to confirm that Trump really did write the part of the book where he made clear that he didn’t trust his employees to do anything without his direct involvement. This matters, because it helps corroborate in advance Michael Cohen’s upcoming testimony about how Trump instructed him to take out a home loan and pay off Stormy Daniels.
In that sense, the book publisher’s transactional, “boring” testimony is potentially as crucial as Stormy Daniels’ explosive testimony. These various witnesses all fit together in different ways. For every high profile material witness spelling out Trump’s crimes, there’s a low profile nitty gritty witness whose job is simply to help verify what the core witnesses are saying.
