Word with lawrence odonnell. At evening and put me down as desperately available to be on to talk with you and rachel, talking about this trial any night. I marked you down. See you tomorrow night. Thank you. Well, the excitement and anticipation in the room had a new high at 10 32 a. M. She entered wearing all black, as if on her way to a funeral. The loosefitting, plain black Clothing Dripping from her shoulders to her toes suggested modesty. The makeup was minimal. The way she and the other moms in her neighborhood might look when shopping at the local grocery store. The long, blonde hair, held up with a clip at the back of her head, the way it might be in a utilitarian way while doing dishes or checking one of the horse shoes on her horse. She later spoke of so proudly. When she walked by him, her face had the same expressionless, somber look that all of the jurors always have when they walk by him. Looking at the floor. She did not look at him. The first time they were in a room together, his bodyguard was standing outside the door. This time his bodyguards were much closer. She was alone in the room with him that first time. This time there were over 100 people in the room, all watching her. Except him. He did not look at her. When she sat down, a Court Officer said, quote, pull your chair up to the microphone and state your first and last name and spell your name for the record. The witness, ready . My name is Stormy Daniels. Last name, daniels. The court, all right, good morning, ms. Daniels. The witness, thank you. Direct examination question. Good morning, ms. Daniels. Good morning. Ms. Daniels, have you also been known as Stephanie Clifford . Answer, yes. Question, what name do you prefer we use in court . Answer, Stormy Daniels. In the next couple of minutes we learned she was born and raised in baton rouge, louisiana. Quote, my parents split up when i was four years old. I was mostly raised by mom. A very low income family. She was a single working mom. I went to a private, very christian, very script very strict Elementary School my dad paid for. I was in the journalist club. She was in a room filled with journalists, many of whom were probably editors of their high school newspapers, but there the similarity ended between her and anyone else in that room. She described the beginning of her career as what she called an Exotic Dancer and said, quote, the people who make the most for their appearances were the people, the girls, performers who had done adult films. So she acted in her first adult film along with a girlfriend of hers. Quote, i will cut out all of the other details and five days later she got on a plane to fly back home and i got offered a contract at Wicked Pictures. Prosecutor, and how old were you at the time . Daniels, 23. Four years later she was at a celebrity Golf Tournament in nevada where the adult film company, wicked entertainment, was sponsoring one of the holes on the golf course. Question, did you meet donald trump on the golf course at that celebrity Golf Tournament in lake tahoe . Answer, yes i did. Question, can you describe how you encountered him on the golf course . Answer, it was a very Brief Encounter. The players came through very quickly. We met every person who was in the Golf Tournament at the moment. They came through. Obviously, they would take their shot. I would say hello and introduce myself to them. I introduced myself, the company, and the other contractor girls, not just a mr. Trump, but to every player that came through. Give them water, posed for pictures. It was a very Brief Encounter on the course. Every one of the dozens and dozens of golfers that they had a Brief Encounter with Stormy Daniels at that hole on the golf course. For donald trump, the encounter continued today in a manhattan courtroom almost 18 years later. Donald trump was the only man on that golf course that they who did something stupid enough to land him in the defendants chair in a courtroom today for the 130,000 paid to Stormy Daniels to buy her silence about what happened next. That, too, she said was very brief. Donald trump invited her to dinner according to her testimony. His bodyguard brought her up to his hotel room to meet there instead of at a restaurant. She testified that she expected to go to a restaurant and they never did. She was not excited about going to dinner with donald trump, but her publicist was. He said, i think you should go. It will make for a great story. He is a business guy, like what could possibly go wrong . Stormy daniels told her now familiar story of that evening in the hotel room with donald trump, leaving out some of the details she has included in previous television interviews, at the direction of the judge who tried to keep those details at a minimum, but donald trump was apparently bothered by everything he heard in her testimony because the judge held a Bench Conference with the lawyers in the middle of Stormy Daniels direct testimony outside the hearing of jury in which the judge told Donald TrumpsDefense Lawyer that donald trump committed Contempt Of Court, right there in his chair, in the courtroom this morning. The judge, i understand that your client is upset at this point, but he is cursing audibly and he is shaking his head visually and thats contemptuous. It has the potential to intimidate the witness and the jury can see that. Mr. Blanche, i will talk to him. The court, i am speaking to you at the bench because i dont want to embarrass him. I will talk to him. The court, one time i noticed when ms. Daniels was testifying about rolling up the magazine and presumably smacking your client and after that point, he shook his head and he looked down and later i think he was looking at you, mr. Blanche when we were talking about the apprentice. At that point he uttered a vulgarity and looked at you this time. Please talk to him at the break. Mr. Blanche, yes i will. Immediately after the lunch break, before the jury was brought back into the courtroom, defense attorney todd blanche asked the judge for a Mistrial Saying that so much of Stormy Daniels testimony was unduly prejudicial, including details like donald trump, quote, not wearing a condom. Todd blanche raised to that and said this has nothing to do with why we are here. That the details of the sexual encounter were, quote, extraordinarily prejudicial and you cant unring that bell for the jury. The District Attorney said the conduct that Stormy Daniels described as a witness was precisely the conduct that donald trump was paying to try to hide. The judge noted that he sustained almost all of the Trump Lawyers the lawyers objections and then said in an insult to the Trump Lawyers, quote, i was surprised there were not more objections. That was a signal to donald trump that his lawyers did not do a good job in that section of the trial. The judge said he would issue a limiting instruction to the jury to limit what evidence they can use from Stormy Daniels testimony about those details in reaching their verdict. On crossexamination trumps Defense LawyerSusan Necheles spent a full hour of flat, unrevealing question and answer before ever getting to Stormy Daniels testimony about having sex with donald trump. Susan necheles used the word, pornography, several times to describe what Stormy Daniels does for a living. It was all leading to the one point that Susan Necheles wanted to make for the jury. Question, you are looking to extort money from President Trump, right . Answer, false. Susan necheles did not complete her crossexamination today when the Court Session ended. She had just begun asking Stormy Daniels about her attempt through her lawyer, keith davidson, to sell her straight to the National Enquirer during the president ial campaign in june, 2016. Stormy daniels answer as to why she was trying to sell her story was, quote, get the story out and make some money. For most of her testimony she was wearing eyeglasses that created even more of a remove from the image of an adult actress. Stormy daniels will resume her testimony on thursday morning. Leading off Air Discussion tonight is andrew weissmann, former chief of the Criminal Division in the Eastern District of new york. He is a msnbc legal analyst and coauthor of the bestselling book, the trump indictments. The historic charging documents with commentary. Also with us in the courtroom today and who will be in the courtroom every day of the trump trial. Lisa rubin, also in the courtroom today. I was in the courtroom today, too. Lisa, i want to begin with you because i am challenged in trying to describe the feelings in this courtroom. It is just such an extraordinary place to be, especially today. Especially today and especially contrasted against yesterday, which was one of the most old days of Trial Testimony and also one of the most significant, because yesterday was all about actually proving the crime that has been charged. 34 counts of falsification of Business Records by showing the witnesses who testified. Each and every Business Record alleged to be false and taking them through the statements that are supposedly false. Today, by contrast, did not have very much to do with the law and everything to do with the narrative. I want to get back to something you said about todd blanche, who was, in his motion for a mistrial, told the judge juan merchan that trump had nothing to do with what were doing today. Have to tell you, i think it has everything to do with why we are there, because donald trump engaged in a long conversation with Stormy Daniels the night they were supposedly going to have dinner about the adult Film Industry and he asked a bunch of questions, she said, that were different from the questions people usually ask. I will quote from the transcript. They want to know the salacious things. These were very thought out business questions. I cant tell you if i ever remember someone asking, other than donald trump, do we have a union and how do we get paid and how does the testing work in the industry . Are we worried about getting pregnant or catching something . Stormy daniels assured donald trump that she was safe, that every test she had taken it, good. At that point in the Industry Test required every 30 days. I was quick to point out that in my time in the industry, i chose to work for Wicked Pictures because they are the only condo mandatory company. In other words, he elicited from her that she was safe, that she had no stds, before he selfishly engaged in a sexual encounter with her from which she testified she literally disassociated while she was staring at the ceiling. Because while she would not say she was threatened physically and clarified she was neither threatened physically nor verbally, she felt cornered. She felt she could not get out and asked herself, and this is also in the transcript, essentially what had i done that i so misread the situation . What have i done to get myself here . And so with all due respect to todd blanche, that was a big part of why we were there today because that is the story that donald trump and Michael Cohen never wanted Stormy Daniels to tell anyone, much less all of the american people. And lisa, stay on that point for a moment. I wrote it down right here in my notebook. The very worst thing that went through my mind is 60yearold donald trump, not wearing a condom with a 27yearold woman from louisiana. A state for a 27yearold woman or a woman of any age now cannot get an abortion if they make the mistake of having sex with someone like donald trump, who is not using a condom. And the idea that that abortion ban that so many women in this country are living with was inflicted on them by the defendant in this case, described today as not wearing a condom. That part of it, i will tell you, did not even occur to me. The Power Imbalance on the other hand, and in particular what i will call the Fortune Imbalance between them, it is not lost on me that Susan Hoffinger for the prosecution throughout for Stormy Daniels that she was not only from a messy home life and a troubled home, but she was a stars didnt who won a full scholarship to study veterinary medicine. Why didnt she go . Because you still needed money to pay for incidentals. She stayed home for a year thinking she was going to make money and that is how she became an Exotic Dancer. You and i can say to each other we wish we lived in a world where educational credentials and smarts of accusing a former president of something that is not sexual assault, but is not quite consensual shouldnt matter, but that is not the world we live in now. Understanding how jurors think now, their first move was to situate Stormy Daniels, former adult film star, as being every bit the intellectual equal if not more so than the person she was accusing of the crime. There was a lot of chatter in the courtroom today by reporters who had not spent their lives in courtrooms as reporters. General political reporters find themselves in the courtroom. I dont think they know what they are experiencing. Among that group there was a chatter about how the jury doesnt like her, isnt going to identify with her. You have handled many prosecutions, with witnesses who are murderers and confessed murderers in cases on the Witness Stand. It is not uncommon for juries in criminal cases to have key Prosecution Witnesses be in ways in life that are completely alien to the jurors themselves. Someone in this alleged crime decided to bring that person into his life. It is really a false thing to look at, is a juror going to like somebody or dislikes somebody . I have done trials where many mobsters who were cooperators testified and of course they are not likable. They are committing all sorts of crimes, but the issue is are they credible in terms of admitting what they did and candid about it . In the same trial and thinking about, there was somebody who was an account and accountant for the mob and jurors hated him because he was not sort of owning what he had done. So i really think that that is where Stormy Daniels said on cross, yes, i hate him. I do not like the defendant. That is actually, from a prosecution point of view, that is a good thing. Let me just read that testimony. This is Susan Necheles, the defense attorney. Am i correct that you hate President Trump . Daniels, yes. I want him to be held accountable. You want him to go to jail, am i correct . Daniels, if he is found guilty, absolutely. I want to focus on something sort of big picture, because this is obviously sensational and you understand why people are interested in it. There are a few things that seem so topsyturvy. One, it does not matter whether she is believed or not. There are three instances that have been brought before the jury that are the subject of the catch and kill. The doorman, ms. Mcdougall, and Stormy Daniels. Everyone agrees that the doorman story was not true. It still was something they did not want to get out. So all of the theater of maybe she was telling the truth, maybe she wasnt, maybe is important for a political audience, but in terms of this jury, it is actually irrelevant. It will help the government show that she is, in fact telling the truth, because it is more motive. But in many ways she is an exhibit today. This is the story they did not want to hear and that is why the details, the ones that todd blanche says are irrelevant and salacious, its not really true. The issue is, do you believe her or not, in terms of that issue. She could say all sorts of terrible things. The real issue is, are they going to believe her or not and then is this something they would want to suppress . Leave aside that this does not convey donald trump as a paragon of virtue. Everyone knows that. Nothing about what happened today is changing anyones mind, but at this trial you have already heard about Election Fraud from his friend, david pecker. Intentional defamation and lying to the public. Hope hicks said no problem with deny, deny, deny. Why . Because those are the things we do. Todd blanche says i want a mistrial because they went numb says he did not use a condom. A mistrial because the witness says he did not use a condom. This is the thing they want to mistrial over . As usual we were sitting beside each other in the courtroom, but we cant talk in the courtroom, so i really dont know what you think. There were