Don ‘wild and untrue’
DA slams allegations vs. hush money probers
The Manhattan district attorney’s office on Thursday said Donald Trump’s “wild and untrue allegations” that prosecutors trying the Stormy Daniels hush money case engaged in “misconduct and malfeasance” in tracking down paperwork tied to Michael Cohen’s conviction are “wholly unfounded” and don’t warrant the extreme punishment he’s asked for.
Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan, who’s delayed Trump’s upcoming trial by about three weeks over the dispute, is expected to hear arguments about the documents on Monday when the trial was slated to begin. The timeline was thrown into question after prosecutors proposed a delay of no more than 30 days following a massive document dump by the feds related to Cohen, who is expected to be the trial’s star witness.
The former president’s lawyers have argued that prosecutors should have previously procured hundreds of thousands of documents in Cohen’s case that federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York recently handed over in response to a subpoena by Trump, claiming they “improperly [selected]” materials solely that would help them.
However, the DA’s office on Thursday said Trump’s claims are a “a red herring” and that the “overwhelming bulk” of the new paperwork represented duplicates or was irrelevant to their hush money case, noting less than 270 documents were related to the subject matter.
Prosecutors said they “engaged in good faith and diligent efforts” to get relevant info from the feds before Trump’s indictment in spring 2023, including requesting and obtaining “extensive evidence” about Cohen’s campaign finance convictions.
The filing makes clear there was no standoff between the DA’s office and the Manhattan U.S. attorney over the Cohen docs. After seeking court authorization, the feds handed over a tranche of paperwork, which the DA gave Trump in June. According to the filing, the feds didn’t provide data they seized from Cohen’s phones “because it would be unduly burdensome” and because Trump’s former right-hand man had already willingly handed the information over to the DA.
Prosecutors said the feds didn’t hand over any FBI recordings of Cohen’s interviews in special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, as requested. They only had one, which had nothing to do with the campaign finance counts against Cohen that are related to the DA’s case. According to Thursday’s filing, the DA then made followup requests that were not fulfilled.
“These extensive efforts easily distinguish the circumstances here from cases where the People ‘made no attempt’ to obtain potentially relevant materials before filing a certificate of compliance,” Assistant District Attorney Matthew Colangelo said.
Cohen served three years in federal custody after pleading guilty to breaking campaign finance laws by facilitating Trump’s hush money payments ahead of the 2016 election and other crimes in 2018, with the feds implicating Trump in their case against his former fixer as “Individual-1.” The office declined to prosecute Trump at the time per a Justice Department policy against indicting a sitting president.
DA Alvin Bragg ultimately charged Trump in the state courts for the hush money scheme last April. The Republican presidential nominee has pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. Bragg alleges Trump concealed a series of checks to Cohen to disguise that they were reimbursement for a payoff to Daniels made with several others to secure his presidential victory.
Trump — who has asked Merchan to sanction prosecutors, throw out their case, and give him three additional months to review the docs — subpoenaed the feds in January seeking more info on Cohen, leading to the rolling dump of documents a few weeks ago. The DA’s office noted Trump hadn’t raised any issue with them until the trial was around the corner; instead, he waited until the eve of what’s expected to be his first criminal trial of four.
Colangelo said Trump has no basis for accusing prosecutors of obstructing his efforts to obtain evidence that could be helpful to his defense. He said that the three-week delay allots “more than enough time” for both sides to review the docs.
“There was no improper selectivity here whatsoever — this was never a joint investigation; the People never had access to the [the feds’] case file; and there was nothing to ‘leave behind,” prosecutors wrote.
“The People sought records related to Cohen’s campaign finance violations because those violations were directly relevant to the criminal charges here; by contrast, Cohen’s other federal convictions are not related to the current charges at all.”
Trump’s lawyer, Todd Blanche, the Manhattan district attorney and a spokesman for the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office declined to comment.