Justice Juan M. Merchan ended a long day of testimony on Thursday by issuing a blistering ruling from the bench denying a request for a mistrial in former President Donald J. Trump’s criminal case in Manhattan.
The ruling by Justice Merchan marked the second time this week that he rejected an attempt by one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers to seek a mistrial, although the frustration he displayed in court on Thursday afternoon was far beyond the emotion he showed after turning down the defense’s previous request on Tuesday.
Justice Merchan rebuffed defense lawyers’ central claim that one of the prosecution’s key witnesses, the porn star Stormy Daniels, had been allowed to alter her account of a sexual liaison with Mr. Trump in a way that was unfair to him.
“Please have a seat so I can render my decision,” Justice Merchan said abruptly, cutting off Todd Blanche, a defense lawyer. “I disagree with your narrative that there is any new account here. I disagree that there is any changing story.”
The judge chided Mr. Trump’s lawyers for missteps during their cross-examination of Ms. Daniels and suggested that the former president’s insistence on entirely denying any sexual encounter with Ms. Daniels had opened the door for the prosecution to introduce specific — and graphic — evidence that the encounter did occur.
“Your motion for a mistrial is denied,” he told Mr. Trump’s lawyers.
Ms. Daniels’s testimony about the episode is important to the state’s case, because the encounter prompted Mr. Trump to purchase Ms. Daniels’s silence with a $130,000 payment through his personal lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, at a vulnerable political moment days before the 2016 election.
When Mr. Trump’s lawyers argued for a mistrial on Tuesday, they said that prosecutors had allowed Ms. Daniels’ testimony to wander into highly prejudicial details as she described having sex with Mr. Trump in a Lake Tahoe, Nev., hotel suite nearly two decades ago.
Addressing Justice Merchan on Thursday, Mr. Blanche made similar claims. He told the judge it was unfair that Ms. Daniels had been allowed to testify that Mr. Trump had not worn a condom. He also complained that she had claimed for the first time on the witness stand that she had been made uncomfortable by what she described as an imbalance of power with the much older and larger Mr. Trump.
Details like that, Mr. Blanche said, were inappropriate for a case that is based on the falsification of business records. Mr. Blanche also repeated Mr. Trump’s denial of any sex with Ms. Daniels, adding that “it has nothing to do” with the charges.
Joshua Steinglass, a prosecutor, disagreed.
Mr. Steinglass told Justice Merchan that the details elicited from Ms. Daniels about sex with Mr. Trump corroborated other parts of Ms. Daniels’s story and gave an insight into why Mr. Trump would have wanted to purchase her silence.
Mr. Steinglass also said that far from bombarding the jury with prejudicial details, the prosecution purposefully held back some of the most salacious facts.
Wesley Parnell contributed reporting.
