That whole episode in the suite,” Manhattan prosecutor Joshua Steinglass reflected on Tuesday, “that was uncomfortable.”
In his closing remarks in Donald Trump’s hush money trial, Steinglass was taking jurors back to the night in 2006, when, as the porn star Stormy Daniels testified this month, she slept with the former president in his hotel room. Steinglass has a crisp and colloquial manner— sometimes referring to people in Trump’s orbit as “these guys”–and as he wrapped up the prosecution’s case against Trump, he put the parameters in plain terms.
Daniel’s “story is messy,” Steinglass continued. “It makes people uncomfortable to hear. It probably makes some of you uncomfortable to hear. But that’s kind of the point.”
Over the past five weeks, Trump’s trial has often revolved around a slew of documents and phone records. The former president has pleaded not guilty to 34 counts of falsifying business records to disguise a payment to Daniels for her silence, and denied any affair with her. As his attorney Todd Blanche put it earlier in the day in his own closing statement, “It’s a paper case.” But in Steinglass’s telling, there was a narrative throughline.
“Stormy Daniels was the motive,” he told the jury.
In the lead-up the 2016 election, the revelation of the Access Hollywood tape–in which, as Steinglass recalled, Trump discussed “grabbing women by the genitals”–threw the Republican nominee’s campaign into disarray. The payment to Daniels followed shortly afterwards, and it amounted, the prosecutor said, to an effort to manipulate the electorate. It could be asked, he acknowledged, how much people would care if Trump had slept with a porn star ten years prior. Voters, Steinglass said, had a right to decide if they did.
Blanche had devoted the thrust of his summation to discrediting Michael Cohen, Trump’s former fixer who arranged the payment to Daniels. Steinglass didn’t quite defend the integrity of the admitted perjurer, but he did offer an emotive account of Cohen’s conduct. It was true, he said, that Cohen was nurturing ill feelings towards his old boss after serving prison time related to the Daniels payment. But Cohen had been “the defendant’s right hand man, his consigliere,” Steinglass said. “When it went bad, the defendant let him loose, dropped him like a hot potato, and tweeted out to the world that Mr. Cohen was a scumbag.”
Steinglass seemed incredulous at the circumstances of “the Trump phenomenon” he was describing, perhaps even slightly amused to be recounting them on this solemn stage. Cohen, he said, is “understandably angry that to date, he’s the only one who’s paid the price for his role in this conspiracy.”
In any case, Steinglass said, while Cohen had lied in the past, he had done so for Trump–and Trump was the one who had employed him “because he was willing to lie and cheat on Mr. Trump’s behalf.” And if Cohen had been lying during his testimony, Steinglass proposed, why wouldn’t he go further and say, for instance, that Trump had privately admitted to sleeping with Daniels?
Blanche looked intently at Steinglass while Trump stared straight ahead. The members of Trump’s family in attendance–Don Jr., Eric, and Tiffany–glanced at their phones. Steinglass’s remarks were set to stretch into the evening, and as Tiffany exited the courtroom during a 5 p.m. break, she mouthed “hey” to Rudy Giuliani’s son Andrew, who has been a fixture at the trial.
By this stage of the broader Trump-Daniels-Cohen story, enacted in 2016 and surfaced in 2018, the details surrounding this colorful cast have spilled out over and over. Steinglass seemed to be attempting, in the six hours his remarks spanned, to recenter the case. News outlets sometimes employ slight euphemisms to describe Daniels’s work–“adult film star” or “adult entertainer”–but he preferred the punchy, evocative pairing of “porn star” with “president.” It was a way to remind the jurors, who will begin to deliberate as soon as Wednesday, that the reason that they had been reviewing documents in this courtroom for over a month could ultimately be traced back to a single night in Lake Tahoe 18 years ago.
