Manhattan prosecutors said Thursday they are willing to delay Donald Trump’s trial on charges related to hush-money payments for up to 30 days to review newly obtained records from federal authorities.
The request could delay proceedings that were scheduled to begin with jury selection on March 25 in New York, the first of four criminal indictments against the former US president.
District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office told the court it accepted the delay because it had received about 31,000 pages of records from federal prosecutors and said it expected more next week.
“Based on our initial review of yesterday’s production, it appears that these records contain material related to the subject matter of this case, including material that the public has requested from the court.” [US attorney’s office (USAO)] “The information is more than a year old and the USAO has previously refused to provide,” prosecutors wrote.
Trump’s lawyers are asking for a 90-day delay or the indictment be dropped, alleging violations of discovery procedures that require the defense and prosecution to share evidence. Prosecutors say such a delay is unnecessary.
New York lawsuit alleges that President Trump had a sexual relationship with adult film star Stormy Daniels 10 years ago against former lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen before the 2016 election. The main suspect is that he instructed her to do so and to keep a false record that she had had sexual contact with him. Cohen will be reimbursed for legal costs.
Trump recently won enough delegates to win the Republican presidential nomination and is expected to face Joe Biden in November, but he has denied meeting with Daniels and has given up on 34 business matters. He has pleaded not guilty to charges of falsifying records.
Last month, prosecutors announced they planned to present evidence of a “pressure campaign” run by President Trump in 2018 to keep Cohen from cooperating with a federal investigation into payments to Daniels. Cohen pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations the same year.
“The timing of the current production of additional materials from USAO is due to defendants’ own delays,” Bragg’s office noted in its motion.
“[D]”Defendants waited until January 18, 2024 to subpoena additional materials from USAO, and then agreed to repeatedly extend USAO’s decision deadline,” the agency wrote.
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Trump, along with 18 co-defendants, is also charged in Georgia with interfering with the state’s 2020 election results to prevent Biden from winning the electoral college.
At the federal level, Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith indicted Biden on charges of plotting to prevent him from entering the White House. Separately, he has accused Trump of conspiring to remove classified government documents after he took office and keep them from reaching the authorities sent to retrieve them.
Mr. Trump is the first former president to face criminal charges, and a conviction could upend what is expected to be a tight rematch with Mr. Biden, who has suffered from low approval ratings for much of his presidential term. But his three criminal cases out of New York state are facing delays as judges consider pretrial motions and appeals, and whether they will be resolved before the Nov. 5 election. is opaque.
