A New York judge overseeing former President Donald Trump’s upcoming criminal trial in Manhattan says he would allow the former president to file an additional motion to delay.
On March 25, Judge Juan Merchan said President Trump’s attorneys can file a motion on rounds of pretrial publicity, giving Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office one week to respond to the filing.
Trump lawyer Todd Blanche asked the judge to file a motion to delay the trial based on pretrial publicity, referring to the media coverage of a criminal case that could potentially bias jurors’ verdict decisions. Judge Merchan said the motion could be filed but emphasized that the trial is scheduled for April 15, according to reporters in the court on March 25.
It came after the judge rejected President Trump’s arguments that the district attorney’s office should have turned over documents involved in the case at an earlier date. His attorneys said the case should be tossed because prosecutors “actively sought to prevent President Trump from obtaining critical materials,” which Mr. Bragg’s office had denied.
The Trump team initially said lawyers would need at least a 90-day delay in his trial to review the new documents before the judge threw it out on March 25.
The trial had been in limbo after a last-minute document dump caused a postponement of the original date. In setting jury selection for April 15, Judge Merchan bristled at claims from the former president’s lawyers that prosecutors intentionally failed to pursue tens of thousands of pages of records from a federal probe covering the same issues.
Prosecutors said only a handful of those newly released records were relevant to the case. Defense lawyers contended thousands of pages are potentially important and require painstaking review. The judge, who earlier this month postponed the trial until at least mid-April, told defense lawyers that they should have acted sooner if they believed they didn’t have all the records they felt they were entitled to.
Last year, Mr. Bragg’s office charged President Trump with 34 felony counts of falsifying New York business records to allegedly cover up a $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels, an adult film actress. The former president has pleaded not guilty and denied Ms. Daniels’s claims about a romantic encounter in the early 2000s.
Namely, he is accused of falsifying the payments to his onetime lawyer, Michael Cohen, now a Trump critic. Lawyers for the former president last year cast Mr. Cohen as an unreliable witness, while a federal judge in a separate case last week said that Mr. Cohen may have committed perjury under oath in denying his early release from probation.
While outside the Manhattan court on March 25, President Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, told reporters that the trial is a form of election interference.
“This is a case that could have been brought three and a half years ago. And now they’re fighting over days because they want to try and do it during the election. This is election interference. That’s all it is. Election interference and it’s a disgrace,” the former president said.
Later on March 25, the former president responded to speculation that he might testify in the business records case. “I would have no problem testifying. I didn’t do anything wrong,” he told reporters.
Despite Judge Merchan’s move to set the April 15 trial date, the former president suggested to reporters outside the court that it likely wouldn’t take place.
“I don’t know that you’re going to have the trial. I don’t know how you can have a trial like this in the middle of an election, a presidential election,” he told the reporters, adding that “it could also make me more popular because the people know it’s a scam. It’s a Biden trial.”
But still, according to President Trump, the case is being rushed. “You have a case which ... they’re dying to get this thing started. The judge cannot go faster. He wants to get it started so badly,” he said.
Other than the Manhattan case, President Trump faces state and federal criminal charges in Georgia and Washington, with prosecutors accusing him of illegally attempting to overturn the 2020 election. He faces federal charges in Florida for allegedly illegally retaining classified documents after he departed the White House in early 2021. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges.
The court activity comes as a New York appellate court on March 25 ruled that President Trump can post a lower bond amount to appeal a $455 million civil fraud judgment that was handed down by a judge several weeks ago. His lawyers now have to pay $175 million to appeal the ruling.
In response, the former president released a video on March 25 that he would respect the court’s decision and “put up cash” to appeal the civil fraud trial.
