The Manhattan district attorney prosecuting former President Donald Trump’s so-called hush money case said the over 170,000 documents his office recently disclosed should not warrant further delay to the trial proceeding, since only fewer than 300 of that batch are potentially relevant.
In a filing on Tuesday, Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg asked the New York Supreme Court to ignore the request from the former president’s lawyers, who said they need the next several months to carefully examine the newly disclosed materials.
The Trump legal team had requested the court to push back the trial date for at least 90 days so that they can extensively review more than 100,000 pages of records unexpectedly released by federal prosecutors last week. New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan, who is overseeing the case, ultimately ordered a 30-day postponement after Mr. Bragg’s office consented out of an “abundance of caution.”
President Trump’s trial, which had been slated to start on March 25, is currently postponed to at least April 15. Mr. Bragg said the case should proceed to trial in mid-April, claiming there is “more than sufficient time” for both sides to review the “limited amount of relevant information.”
“This production contains only limited materials relevant to the subject matter of this case and that have not previously been disclosed to defendant: fewer than an estimated 270 documents, most of which are inculpatory and corroborative of existing evidence,” Tuesday’s memorandum stated.
The evidence Mr. Bragg’s staff disclosed came from federal prosecutors who previously investigated Michael Cohen, President Trump’s former personal attorney. The Trump legal team has said some of that evidence appears to be “exculpatory and favorable to the defense.”
Mr. Bragg disagreed with that claim, saying that those records about Mr. Cohen have already been known to the former president’s lawyers.
“The overwhelming majority of the production is entirely immaterial, duplicative or substantially duplicative of previously disclosed materials, or cumulative of evidence concerning Michael Cohen’s unrelated federal convictions that defendant has been on notice about for months,” his office argued in the filing.
“Although that review is still ongoing, the [plaintiff] now have good reason to believe that this production contains only limited materials relevant to the subject matter of this case,” it reiterated.
Mr. Bragg also responded to claims by the Trump legal team that the case should be dismissed and that he should be sanctioned for making a last-minute evidence dump. That fault, he claimed, lies with defense attorneys who waited too long to subpoena the records from the Southern District of New York, where Mr. Cohen was prosecuted and found guilty in 2018.
“Ultimately, defendant’s focus on purported discovery violations is a red herring,” Tuesday’s filing said, claiming the timing of the records’ release was “entirely a result of defendant’s own inexplicable and strategic delay.”
In the case, Mr. Bragg charged President Trump with 34 counts of falsifying business records in order to conceal an alleged $130,000 payment to adult film actress Stephanie Clifford, also known as Stormy Daniels, in exchange for keeping quiet about her allegations of an affair.
Under New York law, falsifying business records by itself is a misdemeanor, but could be elevated to a felony if the records fraud was used to cover up or commit another crime. Mr. Bragg is pursuing a felony falsifying records charge, meaning that prosecutors would have to prove that it was done to hide the commission of a second crime.
Ms. Clifford alleged that Mr. Cohen, on behalf of President Trump, paid her a sum of $130,000 in exchange for her silence in the days leading up to the 2016 presidential election. As part of his plea deal in 2018, Mr. Cohen has claimed that he made $130,000 in a number of separate payments to Ms. Clifford via a shell company that was then reimbursed by the Trump Organization as legal expenses, even though he earlier claimed he paid the money out of his own pocket.
In a motion filed in late February, President Trump asked Justice Merchan to issue pretrial rulings that would block testimony from Mr. Cohen, whom he called someone with a history of lying and would likely lie again on the stand.
“The Court should preclude Cohen’s testimony in order to protect the integrity of this Court and the process of justice,” the motion read.
In his March 19 order, Justice Merchan declined the request, saying that he was not aware of any basis for the “rationale that a prosecution witness should be kept off the witness stand because his credibility has been called into question.”
