Donald Trump was scheduled to take the stand today in his $250m fraud trial. But yesterday afternoon he announced that he would not do so, declaring that he had already "testified to everything." With nothing to do today as a result, the court's administrators said that the trial, which is nearing its end after two months, would not resume until Tuesday.
[New York Attorney General Letitia] James shrugged off Trump's change of heart in a statement. "Whether or not Trump testifies again tomorrow, we have already proven that he committed years of financial fraud and unjustly enriched himself and his family. No matter how much he tries to distract from reality, the facts don't lie," she said.
It's a sharp change from what he and his lawyers had boasted he was going to do.
[Trump lawyer Alina Habba] said Trump was undeterred because "he is so firmly against what is happening in this court."
"He will open himself up to whatever they want because he's not afraid. People that are afraid cower. President Trump doesn't cower," she said.
Well, it looks like he does, doesn't it, Habba?
It's interesting how they're quoting him here. Here's how Trump reads after he got smoothed out by NBC News:
Here's what he actually wrote. (Udpate: to be clear, this is a screenshot of Trump's tweets on Truth Social, not a parody)
There's the reasonable removal of umms and ahhs and immediately-rephrased misstatements, but there's a point where we're just not accurately reporting what he's writing. We're editing and paraphrasing him to make his ranting gibberish sound relatively measured and normal, removing stuff (typically without adding ellipses) that would make that impossible.
