For nothing more than the purpose of humiliating the Democrats’ political nemesis and their opponent in the 2024 presidential election, Manhattan’s elected progressive Democratic district attorney, Alvin Bragg, has proffered Stormy Daniels’s sensational story of a sexual encounter with Donald Trump in the unprecedented, media-saturated first-ever trial against a former U.S. president.

Trump’s lawyers objected to the testimony, which — as I’ve previously contended, here, here and here — is not relevant to the business-records falsification charges in the case. In particular, Team Trump strenuously objected to graphic details of the sexual encounter that Daniels claims she had with Trump in 2006. As we’ve come to expect, Judge Juan Merchan overruled Trump’s counsel.

But then, quite remarkably, after allowing the jury to hear the salacious testimony — a minute-by-minute account of the alleged tryst — Merchan had the jury leave the courtroom and proceeded to dress down the prosecutors for doing what he allowed them to do.

“I think the degree of detail we’ve been going into here is just unnecessary,” Merchan admonished Bragg’s assistants. Well, yeah, that’s why the defense objected. The judge’s job is to prevent inadmissible and/or unduly prejudicial evidence from being exposed to the jury — not to admit it and then whine about its admission.

On this point, New York’s governing test is set out in Rule 4.06 (“exclusion of relevant evidence”), which instructs a judge to forbid the introduction of evidence if its probative value is merely “outweighed” by the “danger” that it would “create undue prejudice to a party” or “confuse the issues and mislead the jury.” New York’s rule — at least if it is applied as written — is more favorable to criminal defendants than is the federal analogue, Rule 403, which directs that evidence be precluded only if such dangers as unfair prejudice and jury confusion “substantially outweigh” probative value.

It could not be more obvious that Daniels’s testimony has negligible probative value but is immensely prejudicial. It invites the jury to convict Trump because he’s a rogue, and it sows confusion regarding such legal questions as what is meant by “falsifying” records? (That is, the jury may figure that if Trump is lying when he denies the sexual encounter, then the business records must be false, even though the business records relate to Trump’s reimbursement of Michael Cohen for $130,000 paid to Daniels, not whether Trump had sex with Daniels.)

By his post-facto scolding of Bragg’s prosecutors, Merchan is trying to cover a part of the judicial anatomy that is normally berobed. He has to know that commentators, and later, appellate courts, will ask, “How on earth did the judge let that evidence in?” He’s hoping they’ll figure the prosecutors must have misled him. But it’s not like Stormy’s story was never told before today. Merchan knew exactly what he was green-lighting.

By the way, in rebuffing Team Trump’s requests that Daniels’s testimony either be precluded or drastically limited, Merchan reportedly reasoned that it would be up to the jurors to decide on her credibility. It should go without saying that credibility was not the issue.

The core defense objection was not that Daniels is incredible; it was that her testimony about a sexual encounter in 2006 is irrelevant to whether Trump falsified business records in 2017 detailing the repayment of a 2016 debt to Michael Cohen. If we just stick to the indictment — which is usually how it’s done in a criminal case — the matter of whether a sexual encounter between Daniels and Trump actually happened, to say nothing of a jaw-droppingly detailed recitation of exactly how Daniels says it happened, is completely extraneous to the charges.

This is not the first time we’ve seen Merchan make a ruling of great consequence on the false premise that it was up to the jury to decide on a witness’s credibility.

As I’ve previously detailed, Bragg theorizes that Trump’s allegedly fraudulent falsification of business records was done to conceal his prior commission of alleged federal campaign-finance crimes. Let’s put aside the oft-made point that Bragg has no authority to enforce federal law. Merchan has ruled that prosecutors will be permitted to elicit that Michael Cohen pled guilty to two counts of federal campaign-finance violations. The judge even allowed prosecutors to tell the jury about Cohen’s guilty pleas in their opening statement.

Here’s the problem: Cohen’s guilty pleas are not admissible evidence against Trump. Ergo, Trump’s lawyers objected to the prosecutors’ determined effort to get testimony about those pleas in front of the jury. Confronted with that objection, Merchan rationalized that he must permit Cohen to testify about the guilty pleas because they are relevant to his credibility.

Understand: Cohen is a prosecution witness — the star witness. It is the defense that needs to impeach his credibility; the prosecution wants the jury to believe him. Hence, evidence about Cohen’s guilty pleas is supposed to be for the benefit of the defense, not the prosecution.

Here, the defense does not need to use the guilty pleas to federal campaign-finance crimes to impeach Cohen’s credibility. Team Trump has a mountain of other evidence for that purpose — including Cohen’s convictions for perjury and over $4 million in fraud. Consequently, the defense sought to keep the federal campaign-finance pleas out of the case.

It was thus Merchan’s duty to apply the above-described rule for excluding evidence: Weigh the negligible probative value of Cohen’s guilty pleas (which are superfluous on the issue of credibility) against the dangers of unfair prejudice and jury confusion.

Patently, Cohen’s guilty pleas should have been excluded. There is a high probability — especially the way Bragg is urgently calling the jury’s attention to Cohen’s guilty pleas — that the jury will wrongly conclude that Trump must be guilty of campaign-finance violations because Cohen has already pleaded guilty to them. Yet the judge is allowing Bragg’s team to elicit and stress the guilty pleas. Merchan again rationalizes that it is up to the jury to assess Cohen’s credibility, but as with Daniels’s testimony, credibility is beside the point.