NEW YORK CITY — The start of Former President Donald Trump’s historic criminal trial could be postponed by 30 days.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg in a filing Thursday said he wouldn’t oppose a 30-day delay to the trial because it’d give time to review recently tens of thousands of recently received records that could relate to the hush-money payments at the heart of his case.
Trump’s trial is scheduled to start March 25, and Judge Juan Manuel Merchan had yet to rule on Bragg’s proposal as of publication. Bragg contended his office didn’t receive 31,000 pages of documents from a United States Attorney’s Office investigation into hush-money payments related to Trump until Wednesday, in part because of legal foot-dragging by the former president’s lawyers.
Merchan also hadn’t ruled on a request by Trump’s attorneys for a longer 90-day delay.
“Nonetheless, and 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,” Bragg’s filing states.
The Manhattan case centers in part around accusations that Trump made indirect hush money payments of $130,000 to porn star Stormy Daniels — who says she and Trump had sex in 2006 — before the 2016 election.
The accusations led federal authorities to successfully prosecute Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen, who spent time in prison before becoming a witness for Bragg.
Bragg last year leveled criminal charges against Trump, accusing him falsifying business records related to hush-money payments in a bid to hide damaging information from the public before the 2016 election.
Trump pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts in the case and has maintained he committed no crime in the run-up to the trial, which would be the first criminal prosecution of a former president.
The trial appeared set to begin as scheduled, as Trump lost bids to delay or dismiss the case.
Bragg, in his new filing, wrote he received 73,000 pages of records from the federal prosecutors and passed them along to Trump’s team last year. But he argued Trump’s team waited until January to subpoena for more records, which led to the 31,000-page document dump this week.
“We submit this notice before filing our opposition to defendant’s motion to make the Court aware of yesterday’s developments as promptly as possible and to permit the Court to consider how to proceed,” he wrote.
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