Judge sets Trump’s hush money trial for April 15, rejecting further delay

NEW YORK — A New York judge scheduled former President Trump’s hush money trial to begin April 15, enabling his first criminal trial to still take place this spring after a last-minute delay.

Trump, who has looked to postpone all four of his criminal cases beyond the election, requested the judge toss his case over new documents recently turned over, or at least sanction Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg (D) and postpone the trial.

Judge Juan Merchan rejected all of those requests during a hearing on Monday, ruling in favor of Bragg by refusing to push the trial deeper into the campaign season, setting jury selection for April 15.

“The court finds that the people have complied and continue to comply with their discovery obligations,” Merchan said.

Trump’s trial had long been scheduled to begin on Monday, but at the last minute, Bragg’s office consented to a multi-week delay.

The scheduling hiccup came after the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York turned over more than 100,000 pages of records in recent weeks. The parties have traded blame for why the documents did not come to light earlier.

Rather than begin the trial on Monday, the parties instead convened to sort out the document kerfuffle.

Trump attended the hearing alongside a roughly half-dozen of his lawyers, occasionally whispering to them but otherwise sitting stone-faced. He sat back in his chair for most of the hearing, looking ahead toward the judge.

In comments after the hearing, Trump repeated familiar claims that the Bragg’s case was brought to keep him from campaigning for November’s election.

“This is a case that could have been brought three and a half years ago and now they’re fighting over days because they want to try to do it during the election. This is election interference. That’s all that is. Election interference,” he told reporters outside the courtroom.

Trump is charged in the case with 34 counts of falsifying business records over reimbursements to his then-fixer, Michael Cohen, who paid porn actress Stormy Daniels $130,000 just before the 2016 election to stay quiet about an alleged affair with Trump.

Trump, who acknowledges the reimbursements but denies the affair, pleaded not guilty.

Inside the courtroom, Trump’s team and prosecutors disagreed about how many new and relevant documents there were, with Trump attorney Todd Blanche claiming there were “thousands and thousands” without providing a specific number. Assistant District Attorney Matthew Colangelo, meanwhile, estimated there were only about 300 new, relevant records.

Blanche also went further, asserting that Bragg’s office was obligated to have the new documents months ago so Trump could adequately prepare his defense.

That notion led to condemnation from Merchan, who raised his voice at one point as he pressed Blanche to cite a singular past case supporting his position.

“If you don’t have a case right now is really disconcerting because the allegations the defense makes in all of your papers, about the people’s misconduct, is incredibly serious, unbelievably serious,” Merchan said.

“You’re literally accusing the Manhattan DA’s office and the people assigned to this case of prosecutorial misconduct and trying to make me complicit in it. And you don’t have a single cite to support that position?” he added.

Updated 1:16 p.m.

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