Prosecutors lost little time objecting to Donald Trump's attorneys Monday, firing off a complaint in opening statements as the former president's team made claims about why payments were made to adult movie star Stormy Daniels.
Trump's lawyer Todd Blanche had said that the hush money deal with Stormy Daniels was made to protect Trump's family from the story becoming public.
He also suggested that Trump was only following advice given to him by his lawyers — and that's when the prosecution objected.
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MSNBC host Katie Phang was inside the courtroom and said that the objections involved arguments both sides had over attorney-client privilege between Michael Cohen and Trump. According to Blanche, Trump relied on his attorneys to tell him what was or wasn't legal.
But, because of the privilege, attorneys for the prosecution have been unable to dig into that claim.
"Donald Trump refused to waive attorney-client privilege," legal expert Maya Wiley told MSNBC. "So, you can understand the prosecutor saying, 'Wait, we don't have the ability to challenge what your client wouldn't waive, and now you're putting in before a jury essentially a kind of defense without it being subject to real testing in a court before the jurors.' And so I can kind of understand why this would become one that they would object to."
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The judge sustained the objection.
The second objection came when Blanche attempted to tell the jury that Michael Cohen lied under oath in a court, MSNBC's Lisa Rubin posted in her running updates from the trial.
The prosecution objected, saying there was a lot of ambiguity about where and how Cohen "lied" from Trump's lawyers. The judge agreed in that case, too.
See a brief discussion about it in the video below or at the link here.
Trump's lawyers draw rare objections from prosecutors in opening statements youtu.be
