Prosecutors say Trump's hush money trial should get underway on April 15

NEW YORK >> New York prosecutors on Thursday urged a judge to start Donald Trump's hush money criminal trial on April 15, saying the defense's calls for further delays or dismissal of the former president's case because of a last-minute evidence dump were a “red herring.”

The vast majority of records that Trump's lawyers received in recent weeks — more than 100,000 pages from a prior federal investigation into the matter — were “entirely immaterial, duplicative or substantially duplicative” of evidence they'd already been given, the Manhattan district attorney's office said.

One batch containing 31,000 documents had fewer than 270 that were relevant to Trump's case and had not previously been given to his lawyers, prosecutors said. The U.S. attorney's office in Manhattan finished giving evidence to Trump's lawyers on March 15.

Trump pleaded not guilty last year to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in what prosecutors said was an effort to hide arrangements to bury damaging stories during his 2016 presidential campaign

His lawyers' “grab-bag of meritless discovery arguments is the latest of a long series of attempts to evade responsibility for the conduct charged in the indictment,” Assistant District Attorney Matthew Colangelo wrote.

In all, about 10 million pages of evidence have been turned over to Trump's lawyers since his indictment a year ago.