Trump hush-money trial: Stormy Daniels to continue testifying – live

Stormy Daniels has arrived at the Manhattan courthouse for her second day of testimony.

In another significant win for Trump, Georgia’s state court of appeals on Wednesday said it would consider an appeal from the former president against an order allowing Fani Willis, the Fulton district attorney, to continue prosecuting his election interference case in Fulton county.

The decision to hear the appeal is a significant win for Trump. It decreases the chances that the case will go to trial before the November election and allows Trump and his lawyers to continue to undermine Willis’s credibility and keep questions about her judgment in the public eye.

Here’s the full story from Kira Lerner, Sam Levine and George Chidi:

Trump’s New York criminal case is the first of four such cases to reach a jury, while the other three have been hit by serious delays that could prevent them from starting before November’s presidential election.

Also on Tuesday, the federal judge in the case alleging Trump retained classified documents at this Mar-a-Lago club in Florida indefinitely delayed setting a trial date after ruling the case was nowhere near ready to face a jury.

My colleagues Hugo Lowell and Cameron Joseph have the full story:

The federal judge overseeing Donald Trump’s prosecution on charges of retaining classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago club on Tuesday formally scrapped her scheduled 20 May trial date without setting a new date, ruling the case was nowhere near ready to take before a jury in Florida.

The fact that the original May trial date would not hold was a foregone conclusion and has been apparent since last year, given delays with pre-trial litigation and the number of unresolved legal issues that have only increased in recent months.

The presiding US district court judge Aileen Cannon set several new deadlines in a five-page order scrapping the trial date, seemingly in an effort to get the case back on track, but the drawn-out nature of the dates cast doubt on the likelihood of a trial before the 2024 election.

The Guardian’s Victoria Bekiempis has been reporting from court – and saw first-hand how Stormy Daniels’ testimony got off to a lurid start.

She writes that as Daniels took her seat on Tuesday, Trump turned to look at her and then leaned back in his chair, with an impassive look on his face. Trump’s son Eric, who was in the front row of the gallery, behind his father, looked at the wall. Alina Habba, a Trump attorney not on this case, sat with her arms crossed.

The long-awaited courtroom showdown between Daniels and Trump then began. Over the course of several hours, Daniels dished up a made-for-tabloid mix of titillation and gossip in detailing an alleged encounter with him some 20 years prior.

You can read her full report on the details of Daniels’ testimony here:

Daniels testified for nearly four hours on Tuesday. Here’s a recap of her first day on the stand:

• Daniels testified that she and Trump had a sexual liaison in 2006 that left her nervous and ashamed. Prosecutors allege that in 2015, Trump, his then lawyer Michael Cohen and tabloid honcho David Pecker plotted to bury stories that could thwart his Republican presidential bid. Cohen allegedly shuttled a $130,000 hush-money payment to Daniels less than two weeks before the 2016 presidential election, to keep her from going public about her claimed sexual liaison with Trump.

• Daniels said she had met Trump at a celebrity golf match in Lake Tahoe, and that she had gone to his hotel room under the belief that they would be getting dinner after meeting there. Per instructions from Trump’s bodyguard, Keith Schiller, she arrived at his penthouse to find Trump wearing “silk or satin pyjamas” and she asked him to change.

• Daniels said Trump repeatedly grilled her on her time in the adult industry, including: “What about testing? Do you worry about STDs?” He asked whether she had been tested. She later testified that Trump did not use a condom.

• Daniels said there was a brief discussion of Trump’s wife, Melania Trump, during which he said they slept in separate rooms. She also said he compared her to his daughter, Ivanka Trump.

• Daniels said she used the restroom and when she exited, she saw Trump on the bed in his boxers and a T-shirt. “I just thought: oh my God, what did I misread to get here?” She said, comparing it to a “jump scare”. “The intention is pretty clear if someone’s stripped down to their underwear and on the bed.” She said it suddenly felt like the room was spinning, like blood was draining from her hands and feet.

• Daniels said that she tried to make a joke and leave, but Trump stood up between her and the door. She testified that Trump told her: “I thought you were serious about what you wanted, if you want to get out of that trailer park.”

• Daniels said she “blacked out” during her “brief” sexual encounter with Trump. “I was not drunk, I was not drugged … I just don’t remember,” she told the jury. She said she “was staring up at the ceiling and didn’t know how I got there”. She testified that she remembered her hands were “shaking so hard that I was having a hard time getting dressed” afterwards, and that Trump told her: “Let’s get together again, honey bunch!”

• Trump’s team demanded a mistrial over what they said were prejudicial and irrelevant comments. The judge rejected the request and said defense lawyers should have raised more objections during the testimony.

• Daniels said that in 2011, a man approached her at a Las Vegas car park and threatened her against coming forward. Her former attorney, Michael Avenatti, publicized a sketch of the man, and then filed a defamation suit after Trump denied involvement. Daniels said she thought a defamation claim was “risky” and “not worth it”, but that Avenatti filed it without her permission. The case was thrown out, in Trump’s favor.

• Under cross examination, Daniels acknowledged that she “hates” Trump. “I want him to be held accountable,” she told the jury. Daniels also admitted she has chosen not to pay about $560,000 in legal fees that she owes to Trump after she filed and lost a defamation suit against him.

Good morning and welcome back to our live coverage of Donald Trump’s hush-money trial where Stormy Daniels is returning to the stand for a second round of testimony.

The adult film star, whose brief alleged affair with the former US president has been the subject of much salacious questioning by prosecutors, will face further cross-examination from the defense.

The relationship between Trump and Daniels is central to the case because Trump’s then lawyer and personal fixer, Michael Cohen, paid her $130,000 to keep quiet about their alleged sexual encounter during the 2016 election campaign.

Prosecutors argue that the money paid to Daniels was therefore an election expense and was deliberately entered wrongly in Trump’s business documents – with that act being the crime, rather than anything to do with the actual payment of hush money to cover up the alleged affair.

However, during the last court session on Tuesday Daniels went into detailed descriptions of her sexual relationship with Trump, prompting a rebuke from Judge Juan Merchan and Trump’s lawyers to again bid – unsuccessfully – for a mistrial.

Daniels testified that she pocketed about $96,000 of the $130,000 payment, after her agent and lawyer took cuts. The news of the pay-off only emerged in the US media in 2018.

Trump is charged with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in connection with the payments and had pleaded not guilty.

Court is expected to resume at 9am ET. We’ll bring you all the latest from our reporting team in the Manhattan criminal courthouse as we get it.