NEW YORK — The judge overseeing Donald Trump’s pending charges related to 2016 hush money payments ordered a one-month delay in the trial that was due to begin this month, saying lawyers need time to review a fresh set of potential evidence and he wants to hear arguments about whether the issue was handled properly.
The trial had been scheduled to start March 25, and would have been the first criminal trial of a former president in U.S. history. With Trump’s other criminal cases mired in separate delays, it may yet still be the first such trial. But that timing was thrown into turmoil earlier this week as Trump’s lawyers accused prosecutors of dealing unfairly with them in the handling of more than 100,000 pages of material that could be evidence in the case.
New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan notified the parties Friday that instead of starting jury selection on March 25 as planned, he would push the trial back 30 days. The judge said he will hold a pre-trial hearing on March 25 to discuss the dispute over evidence.
“The court will set the new trial date, if necessary, when it rules on Defendant’s motion following the hearing,” Merchan wrote.
Also Friday, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said he would soon receive about 15,000 new pages of documents from the U.S. attorney’s office — Bragg’s federal counterparts — on top of the 100,000 pages he got earlier.
Those federal prosecutors previously investigated much of the same conduct that Bragg’s office focused on when charging Trump last year with violating state laws on business records. Trump is accused of scheming to cover up his payment of hush money in 2016 to hide from the public an alleged sexual liaison years earlier with an adult-film actress.
Lawyers for Trump, who is again running for president and has clinched the Republican nomination, have argued that evidence from the federal investigation is critical to their being able to defend their client from the state charges. They also have accused prosecutors of deliberately withholding reams of such documents until the last minute before the scheduled trial start date.
The latest legal imbroglio for Trump is a byproduct of the difference of legal opinions between federal and state prosecutors about a chain of events dating back to 2016. Now, the dispute over trial evidence could further delay a criminal case that is already eight years in the making.
The defense team had asked for at least a 90-day delay in the trial, while Bragg on Thursday suggested a delay of one month.
The U.S. attorney’s office “should be permitted to address the extraordinarily serious claim” by the Manhattan district attorney that federal prosecutors “wrongfully withheld responsive materials on a previous occasion,” Trump’s lawyers wrote in their letter to the judge.
The three other criminal cases against Trump all face a variety of delays: in Washington, D.C., where he is charged with conspiring to block the 2020 election results, the court is waiting for the Supreme Court to rule on Trump’s claims of presidential immunity; In Florida, where he is charged with mishandling classified documents and obstructing justice, the judge is still weighing a host of complex legal issues, many of them revolving around national security sensitivities; and in Georgia, state prosecutors have been embroiled in a two-month legal drama over a personal relationship that probably will force one of the key lawyers off the case.
Trump has pleaded not guilty to all the charges against him and accused prosecutors of pursuing him for political reasons as he runs for president again. Earlier this week, he won enough primaries to become the presumptive GOP nominee, setting up a rematch between him and President Biden.
The legal fight that erupted just two weeks before jury selection was due to start in the trial traces back to the federal investigation of Trump’s hush money payments.
Trump allegedly used his then-lawyer Michael Cohen to make $130,000 in payments to Stormy Daniels to pay for her silence about a sexual liaison years earlier.
The U.S. Attorney’s office investigated that payment, and Michael Cohen’s finances more broadly. In 2018, Cohen pleaded guilty to a number of charges, including tax evasion, making an illegal campaign donation, lying to a bank, and lying to Congress.
Cohen’s guilty plea made clear that he arranged the payment to Daniels at the behest of Trump, but federal prosecutors determined the evidence was not strong enough to charge Trump for several reasons — chief among them, their concerns about Cohen’s credibility, according to people familiar with the discussions who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe internal deliberations.
The U.S. Attorney’s office “was never going to bring a case in which Michael Cohen was a government witness,” said one person familiar with the matter.
Part of the federal officials’ concern was that even as Cohen agreed to plead guilty, they still suspected he was being dishonest with them and refusing to divulge everything he knew about alleged criminal conduct.
There were other, more pragmatic reasons to avoid filing federal charges against Trump, these people said. For one thing, it has long been Justice Department precedent that a sitting president cannot be accused of a crime, let alone charged, and Trump was in office while much of the federal investigation was underway. Secondly, a trial defeat in a past campaign finance case weighed heavily on federal officials’ minds.
In 2012, a jury deadlocked on most of the federal charges against former Sen. John Edwards over nearly $1 million his donors paid to support his mistress during the 2008 presidential campaign. Prosecutors dropped the case weeks after the hung jury.
When weighing charges against Trump, federal prosecutors also worried that what Trump allegedly did in terms of the hush money reimbursements might not be a crime under a careful reading of federal campaign finance laws, the people familiar with the matter said.
Ultimately, prosecutors decided it did not make sense to file federal criminal charges against a former president on an issue that was a close call legally, and depended on a star witness with a terrible track record, these people said.
Years later, the state-level Manhattan district attorney’s office, first under Cyrus Vance and later Bragg, decided to see if they could prove violations of state law for the hush money payments. Last March, after Bragg filed the first indictment in U.S. history of a former president, lawyers for Trump began demanding access to the federal investigative file as well as the state case, suspecting that the U.S. Attorney’s office held key evidence that could help Trump by further eroding Cohen’s credibility.
Trump’s lawyers were using a strategy deployed in all of his criminal cases — making far-reaching demands for discovery, or potential trial evidence, that could be beneficial in a number of different ways. Extensive hunts for discovery material could bog down prosecutors’ time and resources, or find information showing unfairness toward their client, or simply cause major delays to the trial process.
This week, that strategy seemed to pay off for the defense lawyers, as the Manhattan district attorney said it was receiving three large tranches of documents from the U.S. Attorney's office.
The first tranche, Bragg’s office said in a court filing, consisted of roughly 73,000 pages of records, “the vast majority of which are irrelevant to the subject matter of this case.”
The second set of papers, totaling some 31,000 pages, was described somewhat more ominously by Bragg in his filings. “Those records appear to contain materials related to the subject matter of this case, including materials that the People requested from the [US Attorney] more than a year ago and that the [US Attorney] previously declined to provide," Bragg wrote in a court filing.
The third batch of some 15,000 pages delivered Friday was more like the first, prosecutors said, not particularly relevant to the hush money case.
Trump’s lawyers seized on the varying descriptions of the material to suggest the district attorney are mischaracterizing both the material and the seriousness of the dispute.d be quite significant.
Trump’s quickly lawyers seized on the varying descriptions of the material to suggest the district attorney’s office was mischaracterizing both the material and the seriousness of the dispute.
Noting that Bragg has claimed in his court filing that his office had requested some of the material from the U.S. Attorney more than a year ago and been denied, Trump’s lawyers suggested that claim may not be true.
“We expect there will be factual disputes about the timing and scope of any such requests, which will require a response” from the U.S. Attorney’s office, Trump lawyers Todd Blanche and Susan Necheles wrote Friday. The judge, the lawyers said, will have to make “credibility determinations.”
Barrett reported from Washington.
