In a recent interview on CNN, the network’s legal analyst Elie Honig argued that Donald Trump’s defense team in his New York City criminal case was effectively eroding its credibility before presiding Judge Juan Merchan.
Honig was speaking in the context of the Trump team’s recent failures in trying to delay Trump’s trial in the case, which is scheduled for next week. They tried it in connection to an attempt to get the trial moved and tied to a challenge to a gag order on Trump from Merchan, failing repeatedly.
“I take the real life view, having been in courtrooms, that when you’re a lawyer and you go in front of a judge, your credibility is precious,” Honig argued on CNN. “And if you are bringing motions that you’ve already lost on that have next to no basis, next to no merit, you will lose your credibility. And believe me, that will come back to haunt you. There will be times throughout this trial when you’re going to need the judge to trust you. You’re going to need the judge to give you the benefit of the doubt. And I think by making these motions that they’ve made over this past week, Trump’s lawyers have really given away some of that crucial credibility.”
Another of the recent initiatives from the Trump team was a late-stage push for the judge’s exit from the case, pointing to supposed conflicts created by his daughter’s purported political activities. Trump’s team already tried to push the judge out of the case months earlier and lost, and prosecutors argued in response to the latest ambition on this front that nothing had changed to the point of reversing the earlier outcome.
There is precedent for the Trump legal team ending up starkly at odds with a judge during trial. Infamously, Trump and his team were sparring with federal Judge Lewis Kaplan throughout a recent civil trial in New York City that was determining the level of financial penalty to impose on Trump for upheld allegations of defamation. Kaplan even suggested to Trump lawyer Alina Habba that she could face time in detention as the slow-motion stand-off escalated.
