On March 14, attorneys for former President Donald Trump asked for adjournment of an upcoming criminal trial in Manhattan, accusing prosecutors of “mischaracterizations” and other violations in their request for a mere 30-day delay.
President Trump was set to go to trial on March 25 for a case charging him with 34 counts of falsifying business records.
The defense accused prosecutors of discovery violations this week when they dumped 74,000 pages on the defense just three weeks before trial was to begin.
In response, the prosecutors said this week they would not object to pushing the trial back by 30 days, noting they would file the required, formal opposition to the request for adjournment by March 18.
“An immediate adjournment is appropriate, but the Court should reject the People’s effort to ward off President Trump’s pending motion to dismiss the Indictment, which is based on the People’s significant and ongoing discovery violations,” defense attorneys wrote in a March 14 letter made public with redactions March 15.
They requested a hearing the week of March 25 on a forthcoming motion for discovery sanctions.
The defense claimed prosecutors have not been forthcoming in discovery, withholding materials President Trump is entitled to as partially evidenced by the recent production, and argued that the court still has not resolved factual disputes about what evidence will be allowed in the case.
“At the conclusion of that process, again, dismissal will be appropriate,” they argued.
Thirty days are not enough to both review the new 104,000 pages and resolve the pending dispute over allowable evidence, the defense argued.
Prosecutors had claimed that only fewer than 200 of the March 4 production of 74,000 pages was relevant to the case, but noted that a second large batch of documents had yet to be produced to the defense at the time.
Key Evidence Finally Produced
Defense attorneys say the prosecution’s offer of a 30-day delay was full of “mischaracterizations” that they “can only assume will continue.”They had been after the information provided in the 74,000 pages since last November, but prosecutors had quashed attempts to obtain the material from Michael Cohen or his publishers.
Mr. Cohen was previously President Trump’s personal attorney, and later made claims that his former boss asked him to pay off an adult actress alleging an affair and to kill a media story during his 2016 campaign, leading to this case.
Defense attorneys have argued that Mr. Cohen has admitted to lying under oath multiple times and is not a credible witness, and that payments made from President Trump to Mr. Cohen were attorneys’ fees—a central claim in this case.
One of the instances of lying occurred when Mr. Cohen took a plea bargain for tax charges in federal court in the Southern District of New York. U.S. attorneys working on the case had detailed in an official report that Mr. Cohen had repeatedly resisted telling the full truth.
After the prosecutors quashed attempts to obtain related information, the defense subpoenaed it from the U.S. attorneys directly in January, and had that subpoena rejected.
The federal prosecutors required the defense to submit a request for discretionary disclosures, which the prosecutors then opposed “by rely[ing] on federal law and privileges they had no business invoking, which can only be regarded as further efforts to obstruct President Trump’s access to discoverable information that we should be permitted to use to challenge of their star witness, Michael Cohen,” the March 14 letter reads.
Federal attorneys had given the Manhattan prosecutors the 74,000 pages to review, and that was only made available to the defense with redactions early this month.
Given the timeline, the defense took issue with the prosecutors’ characterization that they “diligently sought” records related to Mr. Cohen last year, providing no detail of the steps they took to do so.
In the prosecutors’ most recent court filings, they instead blame the U.S. attorneys for the delay, stating that they “declined” to provide the materials.
“It is similarly wrong, but not surprising, that the People assign blame on President Trump for the untimely disclosures when the People had many years to work with USAO-SDNY to confirm they had collected all information they were obligated to produce,” the letter reads.
