Trump hush-money trial delayed for 30 days as lawyers review new evidence
A judge on Friday delayed Donald Trump’s hush-money criminal trial until at least mid-April after the former president’s lawyers said they needed more time to sift through a profusion of evidence they only recently obtained from a previous federal investigation into the matter.
Judge Juan Manuel Merchan agreed to a 30-day postponement and scheduled a hearing for 25 March to address questions about the evidence dump. The trial had been slated to start on 25 March. It is among four criminal indictments against Trump, the presumptive 2024 Republican presidential nominee.
Trump’s lawyers wanted a 90-day delay, which would have pushed the start of the trial into the early summer. Prosecutors said they were OK with a 30-day adjournment “in an abundance of caution and to ensure that defendant has sufficient time to review the new materials”.
Trump’s lawyers said they have received tens of thousands of pages of evidence in the last two weeks from the US attorney’s office in Manhattan, which investigated the hush money arrangement while Trump was president.
The evidence includes records about former Trump lawyer turned prosecution witness Michael Cohen that are “exculpatory and favorable to the defense,” Trump’s lawyers said. Prosecutors said most of the newly turned over material is “largely irrelevant to the subject matter of this case,” though some records are pertinent.
The hush money case centers on allegations that Trump falsified his company’s records to hide the true nature of payments to 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. His lawyers argue the payments to Cohen were legitimate legal expenses and were not part of any cover-up.
Prosecutors contend Trump’s lawyers caused the evidence problem by waiting until 18 January – a mere nine weeks before the scheduled start of jury selection – to subpoena the US attorney’s office for the full case file.
District attorney Alvin Bragg’s office said it requested the full file last year, but the US attorney’s office only turned over a subset of records. Trump’s lawyers received that material last June and had ample time to seek additional evidence from the federal probe, the district attorney’s office said.
Short trial delays because of issues with evidence aren’t unusual, but any delay in a case involving Trump would be significant, with trial dates in his other criminal cases up in the air and election day less than eight months away.
The defense has also sought to delay the trial until after the US supreme court rules on Trump’s presidential immunity claims, which his lawyers say could apply to some of the allegations and evidence in the hush money case. The supreme court is scheduled to hear oral arguments 25 April.
Trump has repeatedly sought to postpone his criminal trials while he campaigns to retake the White House.
“We want delays,” Trump told reporters as he headed into a 15 February hearing in New York. “Obviously, I’m running for election. How can you run for election if you’re sitting in a courthouse in Manhattan all day long?”
reportedly told the LA news station KABC. “This was the guy who had keys to our apartments.”
While Cuellar described having generally positive interactions with him, he said the truth about the man known to him as Clemens was “very shocking” and “troubling to say the least”.
Cuellar said Clemens was already established as their building’s handyman when Cuellar moved in about 10 years earlier.
He told KABC that he wondered whether the Clemens name was a clue about the dark secret in Basham’s past. The author Mark Twain’s real name was Samuel Clemens, and two of his most famous characters – Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn – faked their deaths.
Bremerton police said they had since closed the child sexual abuse case against Basham. But they also said that they planned to investigate Basham’s “movements and actions” after faking his death in 2009.
The police’s statement didn’t address how it would proceed if it determined that anyone helped Basham.
Details about Basham’s death weren’t immediately available. Information
online from the LA county medical examiner’s office listed his cause of death as “deferred”, or requiring additional investigation, according to the Associated Press.