Judge delays start of Trump’s hush-money trial until mid-April
NEW YORK — Donald Trump’s hush-money criminal trial was delayed Friday until at least mid-April as the judge seeks answers about a last-minute evidence dump that the former president’s lawyers said has hampered their ability to prepare their defense.
Manhattan Judge Juan Manuel Merchan agreed to a 30-day delay starting Friday and set a hearing for March 25 to decide whether prosecutors should face sanctions or the case should be dismissed after Trump’s lawyers complained that they only recently started receiving more than 100,000 pages of documents from a previous federal investigation into the matter.
The New York trial had been scheduled to start March 25. The delay means the trial would start no earlier than April 15.
In a letter Friday, Merchan told Manhattan prosecutors and Trump’s defense team that he wanted to assess “who, if anyone, is at fault for the late production of the documents,” whether it hurt either side and whether any sanctions are warranted.
The judge demanded a timeline of events detailing when the documents were requested and when they were turned over. He said he also want all correspondence between the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which is prosecuting Trump, and the U.S. attorney’s office, which previously investigated the matter in 2018.
Merchan’s decision upended what had been on track to be the first of Trump’s four criminal indictments to go to trial. Trump, the presumptive 2024 Republican presidential nominee, has fought to delay all of his criminal cases, arguing that he shouldn’t be forced into a courtroom while he should be on the campaign trial.
Trump’s lawyers said they have received tens of thousands of pages of evidence in the last two weeks from the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan, which investigated the hush-money arrangement while Trump was president.
The case centers on allegations that Trump falsified his company’s records to hide the true nature of payments to Michael Cohen, who paid porn actor Stormy Daniels $130,000 during the 2016 presidential campaign to suppress her claims of an extramarital sexual encounter with Trump years earlier.
Trump pleaded not guilty last year to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records and has denied having a sexual encounter with Daniels.
No Pence endorsement:
Former Vice President Mike Pence says he will not be backing Donald Trump in the 2024 election, speaking in an interview with Fox News Channel on Friday. Pence ran against Trump for their party’s nomination but dropped his bid before voting began last year.
The decision makes Pence the latest in a series of senior Trump administration officials who have declined to endorse their former boss’s bid to return to the Oval Office. While Republican members of Congress and other GOP officials have largely rallied behind Trump, a vocal minority has continued to oppose his bid.
It also marks the end of a metamorphosis for Pence, who had long been seen as one of Trump’s most loyal defenders but broke with him by refusing to go along with Trump’s unconstitutional scheme to try to remain in power after losing the 2020 election. When
Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, trying to disrupt the certification of Joe Biden’s win, Pence was forced to flee to a Senate loading dock as rioters chanted, “Hang Mike Pence!” outside.
Maine massacre report:
A sheriff’s office investigating a mass shooting in Maine had cause to take the killer into protective custody beforehand and to remove his guns, according to a report issued by an independent commission Friday.
Democratic Gov. Janet Mills and Attorney General Aaron Frey assembled the commission to review the events leading up to Oct. 25, when Army reservist Robert Card killed 18 people in a bowling alley and a bar, and the response to the tragedy.
Led by a former chief justice of Maine’s highest court, the commission heard from law enforcement, survivors and victims’ family members and members of the U.S. Army Reserve as it explored whether anything could have been done to
prevent the tragedy and what changes should be made going forward.
Card, who was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot after a two-day search, was well known to law enforcement, and his family and fellow service members had raised flags about his behavior, deteriorating mental health and potential for violence before the shootings.
Brazil coup plot: Top Brazilian military leaders told police that former President Jair Bolsonaro presented them a plan to reverse the results of the 2022 election he lost, but they refused and warned him they would arrest him if he tried it, according to judicial documents released Friday.
The testimonies of Bolsonaro’s former army and air force commanders to police include the first direct mentions of the right-wing leader as actively participating in a conspiracy to ignore the results of the October 2022 election won by his rival, current President Luiz
Inácio Lula da Silva.
The statements by military commanders during Bolsonaro’s term add to his legal woes as prosecutors seek to find links between him and the Jan. 8, 2023, riots that trashed government buildings in the capital, Brasilia, one week after Lula’s inauguration.
Bolsonaro has denied that he and his supporters attempted a coup. He is barred from running for office until 2030 due to two convictions of abuse of power, but he remains active in Brazilian politics.
Iran missiles: The United States and allies warned Iran on Friday that major Western economies will pile new sanctions on Tehran if it moves forward with an advancing plan to provide ballistic missiles to Russia for its war with Ukraine.
The Biden administration has raised alarms for months that Russia is seeking closerange ballistic missiles from Iran as Moscow struggles to replenish its dwindling supplies.
The U.S. has yet to confirm that missiles have moved from Iran to Russia. But U.S. officials are alarmed by comments by Iranian officials that suggest that a deal is imminent.
One action that the Group of Seven countries are mulling is to prohibit Iran Air, the country’s national air carrier, from flying to Europe, according to a senior Biden administration official.
US marriages up: U.S. marriages have rebounded to pre-pandemic levels with nearly 2.1 million in 2022.
That’s a 4% increase from the year before. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released the data Friday, but has not released marriage data for last year.
In 2020, the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, there were 1.7 million U.S. weddings — the lowest number recorded since 1963. The pandemic threw many marriage plans into disarray, with communities ordering people to stay at home and banning large gatherings.