Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg speaks during a news conference at his office in New York City on February 22, 2024.
Brendan McDermid | Reuters
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg told a judge Thursday he has no objection to delaying former President Donald Trump’s criminal hush-money trial for up to 30 days.
Bragg said delaying the trial would give Trump’s lawyers time to review tens of thousands of documents turned over by federal prosecutors on Wednesday related to the criminal prosecution of Trump’s former personal lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen.
The district attorney told Manhattan Supreme Court Judge Juan Mercan that his prosecution team is preparing to start Trump’s trial on March 25 as currently planned.
But, Bragg wrote in a court filing, “out of an abundance of caution, we do not object to an adjournment to ensure the defendants have adequate time to review the new material.”
Trump is accused of falsifying business records related to hush-money payments Cohen made to porn star Stormy Daniels before the 2016 presidential election to keep her secret about an alleged sexual tryst with the then-presidential candidate .
Cohen will plead guilty in Manhattan federal court in 2018 to paying hush money to Daniels and another woman who said she had an affair with Trump. Cohen violated federal campaign finance rules and will testify against Trump at the trial.
Bragg said in the filing that the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan turned over 31,000 pages of records related to Cohen’s criminal case to his office and Trump’s lawyers on Wednesday.
Bragg said federal prosecutors will file another document next week.
The district attorney said the late arrival of the materials was “solely the result of the defendant’s delay despite the People’s efforts.”
Trump’s lawyers dispute that characterization.
Last week, defense attorneys Susan Necheles and Todd Blanche asked Merchan to either dismiss Bragg’s indictment entirely or delay the trial for 90 days while preventing Cohen and Daniels from testifying.
Trump’s lawyers argued that Merchin should do so because federal prosecutors provided them with 73,000 pages of incomplete records related to Cohen in early March.
Trump’s lawyers wrote that the district attorney “should have obtained and produced these materials long ago, but instead chose to try and fail to prevent us from obtaining them.”
In turn, the district attorney said in the new filing that last year he asked federal prosecutors for full grand jury records related to Cohen’s conviction. The district attorney said the information was sent to Trump last June.
Bragg said that until last week, Trump had “expressed concerns” about whether those efforts were sufficient.
Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said in a statement that Bragg agreed to the delay “after admitting to serious discovery violations.”
“President Trump and his attorneys have consistently maintained that the case has no legal or factual basis and should be dismissed,” Zhang said.
Trump has pleaded not guilty in the case, one of four criminal indictments he faces as he prepares to run against President Joe Biden in November’s presidential election.
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