Trump lawyer’s courtroom antics aren’t doing him any favor: legal analyst

The trial for writer E. Jean Carroll's second civil lawsuit against former President Donald Trump is now underway, and the trial's outcome will determine how much more money he will owe her. Carroll's previous defamation lawsuit against Trump ended with a jury awarding the former Elle columnist $5 million — a judgement that Trump's legal team has been appealing.

MSNBC's Katie Phang offers legal analysis of the second trial in an opinion column published on January 18 — and argues that Trump lawyer Alina Habba's courtroom antics and "heated exchanges" with Judge Lewis Kaplan aren't doing her client or the jurors any favor.

Kaplan, Phang notes, has resisted Habba's efforts to delay the trial and has made it clear that he "wasn't going to be humoring Trump's calendar whims to inconvenience the court." And the judge admonished Habba to "sit down."

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"Allowing Habba and Trump to grandstand and waste time is a disservice to the jurors, because then, their bad conduct becomes the focus of the trial versus the critical, substantive issues that the jurors are there to decide," Phang explains. "Trump acting like a petulant child while seated at a defense table and Habba arguing over objections with the judge denigrates the entire proceeding."

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Read Katie Phang's full MSNBC column at this link.