Judge delays start of Trump's New York hush money trial
A Manhattan judge pushed back former President Donald Trump's trial in his New York criminal case, following a surprise shakeup in the case just 10 days before it had been scheduled to begin.
The trial, on felony charges of falsification of business records related to payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels, had been expected to start March 25, but that date has now been scrapped.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg told New York Judge Juan Merchan on Thursday that his office was willing to delay proceedings after Trump's attorneys protested the late production of a voluminous amount of pretrial discovery in the case. More than 100,000 pages of documents were turned over to Bragg's office by the federal Department of Justice on March 4 and March 13 — and Bragg said another 15,000 pages were slated to be produced March 15.
March 25, which was supposed to be the day jury selection started, will instead have a hearing about this new evidence.
A new date for the trial has not been set. Judge Merchan said that the date for a new trial would be determined after the hearing. "The court will set the new trial date, if necessary, when it rules on Defendant's motion following the hearing.”
UPDATE: It looks like the new material relates to Michael Cohen, and whether his testimony can be trusted. The March 25 hearing is to deal with Trump lawyer Todd Blanche’s request to toss the charges or sanction the prosecutors for “wrongfully withholding” evidence.
“[There] are disputed issues of fact regarding the [DA’s] obligation to obtain and produce these materials much earlier,” Blanche wrote. “[Federal prosecutors] should be permitted to address the extraordinarily serious claim by [the DA] that [federal prosecutors] wrongfully withheld” relevant evidence from Cohen’s case.
In granting Blanche’s request for a hearing, Merchan ordered each side to file a “detailed timeline” of the events surrounding the Cohen docs, including all correspondence between Bragg’s office, the feds, and Trump’s lawyers. He said he’d set a trial date “if necessary” after resolving the dispute.
“The requested documents are necessary for this court to properly assess who, if anyone, is at fault for the late production of the documents,” the judge wrote, “and what sanction(s) if any, are appropriate.”
I guess we’re going to find out whose fault it is that these documents were released so late.