As three out of four unprecedented criminal cases against Donald Trump have encountered significant delays, all eyes have been on Manhattan, where a trial over his hush money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels is scheduled to start in less than two weeks.
But the timeline was thrown into question Thursday after prosecutors proposed a delay of no more than 30 days following a massive document dump related to the 2018 conviction of Michael Cohen, poised to be their star witness.
The feds have been sharing a trove of documents related to Trump’s former fixer in response to a subpoena from the former president, according to court docs filed Thursday. Accusing Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office of evidence suppression, Trump’s side wants more time to review the docs — if not an outright dismissal of the case.
In filings to the judge, Bragg’s office said it wouldn’t object to a delay of the trial slated for March 25, in order to give the ex-president and his lawyers time to review a rolling release of old evidence tied to Cohen’s case.
“[Although] the People are prepared to proceed to trial on March 25, we do not oppose an adjournment in an abundance of caution and to ensure that defendant has sufficient time to review the new materials,” Assistant District Attorney Matthew Colangelo wrote.
The proposal came after Trump’s side on March 8 asked Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan to delay the trial by 90 days — or throw the case out altogether — in light of the evidence dump by feds at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, which came in response to a subpoena from Trump on Jan. 18.
In heavily redacted filings made public Thursday, Trump lawyer Todd Blanche asked Merchan not to set a new date until the SDNY had turned over all the outstanding documents. He asked the judge to impose “severe sanctions” against Bragg’s prosecutors, whom he accused of evidence suppression. He argued that the tranche of paperwork obtained through Trump’s subpoena should have been procured by prosecutors last summer, claiming they “improperly [selected]” materials solely that would help them.
The DA’s office “should have collected all of these documents long ago. Instead, they collected some materials but left others with the federal authorities, in the hope that President Trump would never get them,” Blanche wrote. “That approach is completely unacceptable and a blatant discovery violation.”
Prosecutors countered Thursday that the last-minute production of evidence was Trump’s own doing, noting he didn’t make a fuss over the documents until the eve of the trial.
The presumed Republican presidential nominee has pleaded in Manhattan Supreme Court not guilty to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, carrying up to four years in prison. The charges allege that during Trump’s first year in the White House, he concealed a series of checks to Cohen for a hush money payoff Cohen made to Daniels in 2016. Prosecutors say Trump hid the reimbursement to disguise a “catch-and-kill” conspiracy illegally orchestrated to secure his presidential victory that also included paying off Playboy model Karen McDougal and a Trump Tower doorman.
Cohen, Trump’s longtime mouthpiece-turned-foe — who’s expected to be the trial’s star witness — pleaded guilty to federal charges related to the scheme in 2018 and an assortment of other crimes. Those include tax evasion and lying to Congress about Trump’s dealings with Russia.
He infamously implicated the then-president as “Individual-1” in his Manhattan Federal Court guilty plea, saying Trump had directed him to silence women including Daniels and cementing his bitter feud with his longtime boss. Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison, half of which he served under house arrest at his Trump Park Ave. apartment.
According to Bragg’s office, the 104,000 pages the feds have produced from Cohen’s case contain “largely irrelevant” material, barring 172 pages of witness statements. Trump’s side, in turn, characterized filings in the batch as “exculpatory and favorable to the defense.”
Blanche cited the DA’s recent decision to drop its case midway through trial against three men accused of unlawfully possessing the handwritten lyrics to the Eagles’ “Hotel California” album after the late-stage production of more than 6,000 docs. In tossing that case, Manhattan Judge Curtis Farber partly attributed it falling apart to “passive complicity” by prosecutors.
“The People have been far more than passively complicit in the suppression of evidence in this case; they have actively sought to prevent President Trump from obtaining critical materials to which he is entitled,” Blanche wrote.
Bragg’s office is expected to respond to the prosecutorial misconduct allegations in the coming days, and Merchan has yet to rule on several motions from both sides. Those include Trump’s request to postpone the trial until the Supreme Court rules on his presidential immunity claim.
Trump, 77, faces 91 felonies in four criminal matters including Bragg’s case. Earlier this year, he was ordered to pay more than half a billion dollars in civil judgments in separate cases. The trial timeline is uncertain for his three other criminal cases, in which he’s accused of trying to overthrow the 2020 election and mishandling highly sensitive classified documents.
Blanche, Bragg’s office, and U.S. Attorney Damian Williams’s spokesman declined to comment.
Trump has pleaded not guilty in all the criminal cases.
