Trump hush money trial postponed until mid-April, judge rules – MASHAHER

The trial in the New York hush money case against former President Donald Trump has been delayed until the middle of April, Judge Juan Merchan ruled Friday.

Merchan said the trial — originally scheduled to begin March 25 — would be pushed back 30 days from Friday.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg had previously said he would support the trial being delayed 30 days, into late April. Trump’s legal team requested that it be postponed 90 days.

Bragg said Thursday that Trump’s request to delay the trial was the result of the U.S. Attorney in Manhattan providing over 100,000 pages of discovery, which Bragg said were “largely irrelevant to the subject matter of this case.” The U.S. Attorney’s Office provided an additional 15,000 pages of discovery on Friday, which Bragg’s office said were also “likely to be unrelated to the subject matter of this case.”

The documents relate to Michael Cohen’s guilty plea in 2018 to numerous criminal charges, including making secret payments to women who claimed they had affairs with Trump, lying to Congress about Trump’s business dealings with Russia and failing to report millions of dollars in income.

Bragg’s office brought the case against Trump, accusing the former president of falsifying business records related to Cohen’s $130,000 payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels toward the end of the 2016 presidential campaign.

In mid-February, Merchan scheduled the trial to begin on March 25. He said he expected it would last about six weeks. He had made clear he wasn’t interested in postponing the trial, as Trump’s lawyers had requested.

Trump faces 34 felony counts of falsifying business records related to the hush money payments to Daniels. He has pleaded not guilty.