It was an opening gambit that sparked "more than a half-dozen" objections from prosecutors and surprised legal analysts.
According to reports, most of those objections were sustained by Judge Juan Merchan, including Blanche's claim that there was nothing illegal about Trump's alleged attempt to buy Daniels' silence about their alleged affair with a $130,000 hush money payment — a line of questioning that MSNBC legal analyst Lisa Rubin said was "weird."
“Not just because there was one objection, but because of how many there were relative to the brevity of Todd Blanche’s opening statement," she wrote in a post to X.
CNN legal analyst Norm Eisen agreed, writing in an op-ed that there were "repeated objections that were upheld — probably the highest rate of upheld objections to an opening that I have seen in my 30-plus years of practicing law.”
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Former prosecutor Catherine A. Christian told MSNBC that Blanche "knew that these were objectionable things he was saying."
“They were objected to, but you can’t unring the bell,” she said.
MSNBC's Katie Phang observed that Blanche's tactic could backfire because he "went beyond what he was allowed to do," and "not only did the objections get sustained… it interrupted flow."
“And that sends a message to the jury that Blanche is doing something wrong," she said.
Former acting U.S. Solicitor General Neil Katyal argued that it would be “thoroughly implausible" that Cohen would have paid off Daniels without first consulting Trump, and if the money Trump paid Cohen was truly for “legal expenses," as he had claimed, and not to buy Daniels' silence, Blanche had better have the evidence to support that claim.
“As an attorney, the last thing you want to do is over-promise in your opening statement and tell the jury the evidence is going to show something and it doesn’t actually turn out to show it. That’s when you blow your credibility," Katyal said.
