On March 25, 2024, in New York City, the United States, former US President Donald Trump sat in court to attend the hearing of his criminal case involving allegations of hush money payments to a porn star.
Brendan McDermid | Reuters
Jury selection for Donald Trump’s criminal hush money trial will begin on April 15, a New York judge ruled during a court hearing on Monday.
Judge Juan Merchan issued the ruling after vehemently rejecting arguments from Trump’s lawyers who were seeking to delay the trial. In the case, Trump is accused of falsifying business records in order to silence women who said they had affairs with him.
“It’s really disturbing that you don’t have a case right now,” Mulchamp told the former president’s lawyers.
“You’re actually accusing the Manhattan (District Attorney) office and the people assigned to this case of prosecutorial misconduct,” Merchant said. “You’re saying that the people assigned to this case were engaging in prosecutorial misconduct, and you didn’t have one citation for that. The person who made the accusation.”
Trump was in court listening as Merchin delivered a scathing assessment to his legal team.
As he walked into the Manhattan Supreme Court courtroom, Trump called the case a “witch hunt” and a “hoax.”
At a press conference after the hearing, Trump said he was willing to testify in his own defense. But he added that he believed the case might not go to trial at all.
“I didn’t know you were going to have a trial,” he said. “I didn’t know how you could have a trial like this during an election, a presidential election.”
The hearing came as a New York appeals court significantly reduced the amount Trump must commit to suspending a $454 million penalty due in a separate civil case.
Trump faces a financial reckoning from New York Attorney General Letitia James, who could begin collecting the massive verdict as soon as Monday. The Republican presidential candidate was unable to come up with the cash to pay for the entire judgment to obtain the bond.
But during a midday break in Monday’s hearing, a panel of appeals judges slashed Trump’s bond to $175 million, significantly reducing the amount he must release. The panel gave Trump 10 days to post the bond.
“I have great respect for the appellant’s decision,” Trump told reporters. He then objected to the judge’s $454 million verdict, calling him a “disgrace to this country.”
The hush-money case was originally scheduled to go to trial on Monday, but the case fell apart after Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said on March 14 that he would not object to a 30-day delay to give Trump time to review some of the payments. has been postponed until at least mid-April. Recent submissions.
Trump’s lawyers previously asked Murchin to either dismiss Bragg’s indictment entirely or delay the trial for at least 90 days, arguing that the DA’s office improperly provided them with tens of thousands of pages of case documents that they had little time to prepare .
But Bragg pushed back, telling Merchant that the materials’ late arrival “despite people’s diligence, is solely the result of defendants’ delays.”
The judge at Monday’s hearing seemed highly skeptical of Trump’s lawyers.
“You said from the beginning that the district attorney was obstructive in some way,” Merchan said. “That’s not what happened.”
Trump, who is dealing with four ongoing criminal cases and multiple costly civil cases while campaigning against Democratic President Joe Biden, expressed anger over both the fraud and hush-money cases ahead of Monday’s hearing.
Penalties in civil cases “should be zero, I didn’t do anything wrong!” Trump wrote on his social media site Truth Social.
“The DA case I am hearing today should be dismissed. No crime was committed. Our country is corrupt!” he added in the same article.
Bragg’s indictment accuses Trump of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records and concealing damaging information from voters before the 2016 presidential election.
The case centers on a $130,000 payment Trump made to porn star Stormy Daniels less than two weeks before the election, which Trump went on to defeat Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
Bragg’s indictment alleges that the money was paid by Trump’s then-lawyer Michael Cohen to keep Daniels quiet about an extramarital affair she said she had with Trump years ago.
Cohen has since admitted to making illegal campaign contributions, saying he Trump’s direction.Cohn has become Trump’s sworn enemy, and he is preparing to testify In the hush money trial.
Trump denies having sex with Daniels. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges.
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