In a criminal case alleging that, in 2017, business records were falsified regarding a nondisclosure agreement executed in 2016, Judge Juan Merchan has allowed prosecutors from elected progressive Democratic DA Alvin Bragg’s office to elicit from porn star Stormy Daniels that, in 2011 (i.e., years before anything relevant to the case happened) she was threatened in a parking lot by a man she can’t identify — and whom she did not report to the police. She claims the unknown man warned her to stop telling her story about a sexual encounter she says she had with Trump in 2006 — i.e., five years earlier. She says the “threat” happened after she did an interview with In Touch magazine about the Trump encounter.

Daniels did not actually connect to Trump this uncharged threat that appears nowhere in the indictment. But how else would a jury see it? The jurors have to assume that if the threat had nothing to do with the case, the judge would not have allowed testimony about it.

Note that, if this threat actually happened in 2011, it certainly did not stop Daniels from pressuring Trump to pay up for her silence in 2016 — even though, with a straight face this morning, Daniels told jurors she was not motivated by money . . . even as she accepted the $130,000.

Besides the threat they can’t pin on Trump and that is said to have happened years before the events giving rise to the case occurred, Bragg’s prosecutors this morning also offered — as proof that Trump falsified business records in 2017 — excerpts from Trump’s The Art of the Deal, which was published in 1987, 30 years earlier.