Thursday, 13 in the Trump hush money criminal trial. Now, history, including the former President today, facing the woman he denies having an affair with, denies buying her silence, and denies cooking his company books to cover it up. Stormy Daniels, who testified in great detail today. So much so, the defense moved for a mistrial, which the judge, though displeased by some of it, did not grant. Meaning the defense got their first chance to cross-examine her this afternoon, managing at points to raise questions about her credibility, which in the end, will be up to the jury to decide. There's going to be more cross-examination on Thursday. At At one point, Judge Mirshawn also ordered defense attorney Todd Blanche to speak to his client, Donald Trump, who he said was audibly cursing at points during Stormy Daniel's testimony, behavior the judge called contemptuous. As for Daniel, she'll be back on the stand when the trial resumes Thursday, back with the panel right now, joining our CNN legal analyst, Ellie Honig, Norm Eisen, who served as special counsel, the House Democrats during the first Trump impeachment, and is the author of Trying Trump: A Guide to his First Election Interference Criminal Trial.

So you've been writing Courtroom Diaries, Norm. What stood out to you today? What are the biggest takeaways from her testimony?

Stormy Daniels is not a critical witness to the prosecution, unlike Michael Cohen, who's coming up. She's principally a corroboration witness to provide additional evidence because all of the witnesses we've seen have credibility issues. I thought she was actually more effective on cross-examination, just watching the jury under the pressure of questioning from defense council. Her toughness and steel came out. She pushed back on some of the aspersions that were cast upon her. She did provide corroboration about the 2006 sexual encounter that kicked off this whole case. Then the critical 2016 alleged campaign finance conspiracy. Then it's cover up, and you need that conspiracy and the cover up. She centered on the conspiracy. She brought us back after a very dry document stay.

So you're saying she was better on cross-examination because she was more natural and authentic as opposed to her initial testimony, which was certainly rushed from what we heard from outside the court.

I felt that she was not as effective. It's unusual, but sometimes witnesses Businesses do perform better on cross. It was a challenge to her, and her genuine persona came out. She's a writer. She writes scripts. She's a performer. And I felt that the direct was a little it too performative. She was more genuine on the cross.

What do you make of the defense calling for mistrial?

Well, Ellie and I were chatting about this. There was no chance that they were going to get a mistrial. They wanted to make a point. The judge did agree with them that the testimony went too far. But, and Donald Trump cannot have been too happy about this, the judge pointed out that the defense had failed to object at certain points, that he had to, suiispeonte on his own object at one point. It did go too far, Anderson. There were too many extraneous issues. A reporter asked me, did she talk too much? I said, The problem wasn't talking. It was a failure to listen. She was not hearing the questions and responding to the questions. She was going over that script. But I do think in the end of the day, just watching the jury in the afternoon, the prosecution continued to advance its case. This today was more of three yards in a cloud of dust, and both sides got things that they wanted from today's examination.

It's interesting because I was doing our live coverage, following along with our minute by minute updates from inside the courtroom, I had the exact opposite impression. Now, you had the benefit of being in the courtroom, so I will defer to that. But we do also have to be careful when we play amateur psychologist to the juror's movements, though they were leaning forward, they were taking notes. Okay, they could be taking notes because they think this is a great point, or they could be taking notes because they think this makes no sense and I don't believe it. So let's just all be cautious in reading into the juror's physicality. My impression was she was plausible on her explanation of what happened in that hotel room. It's hard It's hard for me to believe that a juror heard that and thought, This is entirely made up. There may well be some embellishments with Arthur, I think, pointed out effectively in the last hour, but I think it's quite clear they had sex in 2006 in that hotel room. But the cross-exam, boy, her responses were disastrous. I mean, do you hate Donald Trump? Yes, of course she does.

That's a big deal. When the witness hates the person whose liberty is at stake, that's a big damn deal. She's putting out tweets fantasizing about him being in jail. That really undermines the credibility. The fact that she owes him $500,000. She, by order of a court, owes Donald Trump a half million dollars and said, I will never pay him. I will defy a court order. The defense is going to say she's willing to defy a court order. Why? She's not willing to respect an order of a judge. Why is she going to respect this oath she took? I thought it went quite poorly on cross exam. At the end of direct, I thought, Okay, they got what they needed, but I think the cross is making real inroads.

Can I ask you both about part of the cross that has been a theme of the defense, which was this whole thing is just extortion. These are people who had a way of extracting money from Donald Trump, and that's what they did with the threat of disclosing stuff he didn't want disclosed. How do you think that plays into this case? You go first.

You were there. Look, I thought that the importance of starting with Pecker, who makes clear that there is an agreement, and he was very persuasive. And the rest of the case, including... Put the documents half of the case to the side, the cover up to the side. Stormy didn't have anything to say about that. The rest of the case is all a follow-on to Pecker establishing the contours of this campaign finance, election interference, conspiracy. So Jeff, if Donald Trump himself set up the arrangement that was later executed, that rebuts the extortion point. And Ellie, to your point, it's not the note-taking that I found so telling on cross. It was that they didn't take notes. They paid attention. They listened, and she showed her steal. What are you supposed to do? She did do that tweet. She does hate Donald Trump. I think juries, if you're honest with them, that is the one thing they want. Arthur has made a very good living off of this principle. If you are honest with them, they will trust you. They will believe you. You cannot lose credibility.

On that point, there was one confusing line of questioning where she didn't seem to have a solid timeline on why she signed the agreement, where she shifted from saying that it was not out of a desire for money. It was out of fear that she signed this agreement. She said that she didn't want the story to get out, but then she said that she just wanted the story to get out. Then she said she signed it because she She figured it was just easier to do this, to stay quiet, to let them buy her silence. I thought that was a little bit confusing, given that is actually what gets to the heart of this, which is the catch and kill aspect of this, and the fact that she couldn't get out there with her story, what they've been leading up to with David Pecker, Karen McDdougal, and now to Stormy Daniels. That was something that didn't get a lot of clarity in the courtroom today.

The more I marinate on this testimony, maybe the strategy is in part to show, frankly, Unfortunately, with all due respect, how messy of a person Stormy Daniels is. From Donald Trump's perspective, even his demeanor in the courtroom today, the way that she really gets a rise out of him, it makes it very easy to explain why he would think it is extremely important to keep this woman's story from coming out at the exact moment that she was threatening to tell the world. She would have been a character that would have absorbed all of the energy in the campaign had she been out front in that particular moment. For whatever it's worth, the jury saw that today for all its good parts and its bad parts. Stormy Daniels is who she is, and she's not a clean witness in the sense that she's not always telling a straight story. She's not always coming across as credible. Maybe she's acting sometimes. Maybe she's not. There was definitely something that happened, but the nitty-gritty details, you're not really sure how much of it is true. All of that is part of the package, and you can see why Donald Trump didn't want that to come.