Former President Donald Trump will avoid a New York City courthouse for at least another month in Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s lawfare against him for alleged hush money payments, after a last-minute document dump dropped shortly before the scheduled trial.
The trial was originally set to begin March 25 but was pushed back at least 30 days until mid-April after tens of thousands of additional pages of discovery were added.
Trump’s legal team subpoenaed the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office in January for documents related to its 2017 investigation into Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer. The U.S. attorney’s office has turned over roughly 73,000 pages of documents since March 4 in response to that subpoena, but on March 13, the office “produced approximately 31,000 pages of additional records and represented that there will be another production of documents.” Trump initially requested a 90-day delay to review the new discovery.
Bragg acknowledged the new document dump “appear[s] to contain materials related to the subject matter of this case.” Trump’s lawyers “claim the evidence from the federal case was unfairly withheld from them until the 11th hour as they prepared their defense,” The Washington Post noted.
Trump also requested that Cohen and Stormy Daniels, the pornographer whom Cohen paid not to publicize her claims about having an alleged affair with Trump, be blocked from testifying in the trial against him.
Judge Juan Merchan ruled Monday, however, that prosecutors may call both Cohen and Daniels to testify, along with former Trump World Tower
