Trump Pulls Out All the Stops to Try and Stop the Hush Money Trial

Keeping up with Donald Trump’s court schedule is a dizzying task, since he faces two federal trials, a criminal trial in Georgia, and two separate civil and criminal trials in New York. (Oh, and he’s running for president.) A programming note: We’ll be skipping the regular edition of Keeping Up next week as Trump’s hush money trial begins, but we’ll have plenty of other coverage of the trial! This roundup will return the week after. You can also find all the Trump trial–related developments here.

Trump is gearing up for this first criminal trial in his signature style—attack, attack, and attack some more. While the former president’s attorney filed a motion requesting New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan recuse himself from the hush money case, Trump took to Truth Social to blast Merchan. Meanwhile, special counsel Jack Smith issued his sharpest rebuke yet to the judge assigned to his federal classified documents case.

With one week left until the former president’s first criminal trial is set to begin, Trump’s attorneys are throwing everything they’ve got at New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan, including a motion demanding he recuse himself, an appeal to pause his gag order, and a lawsuit seeking to delay the trial.

Trump’s attorneys are targeting Loren Merchan, the judge’s daughter, whom Trump has also previously attacked online, because she was president of Authentic Campaigns, a company that’s worked on a host of Democratic campaigns including Vice President Kamala Harris’ 2020 presidential bid. Trump’s attorneys argue this creates an appearance of impropriety and risks the fairness of the trial and that Merchan should recuse himself.

The motion also argues that Merchan’s recent gag order, which bans Trump from publicly commenting on court staff, witnesses, prosecutors, their family members, and Merchan’s family is unfair because it threatens Trump “with contempt and worse if he points out the Court’s familial conflicts,” wrote Todd Blanche, Trump’s attorney. And on Monday, attorneys for Trump filed an appeal to pause that gag order alongside a request to move the venue of the hush money trial.

In addition to that appeal, the New York Times reported that Trump’s attorneys also intend to file a lawsuit against Merchan in an effort to delay the April 15 trial.

Meanwhile, Trump has been on a tirade against the judges who have overseen his recent court battles, including Merchan. “If this Partisan Hack wants to put me in the ‘clink’ for speaking the open and obvious TRUTH, I will gladly become a Modern Day Nelson Mandela—It will be my GREAT HONOR,” wrote Trump on Truth Social.

The New York Supreme Court judge rejected Trump’s last-ditch efforts to avoid his hush money trial, denying motions to delay the start date and claim presidential immunity.

Trump’s attorney filed the motion to dismiss back on March 7, claiming presidential immunity only 17 days before the hush money trial was supposed to begin on March 25. (After an unexpected drop of thousands of documents and some combative back-and-forth between Trump and Bragg, the trial was delayed until April 15.)

Last week, Merchan ruled Trump’s motion to dismiss was “untimely,” since it was filed only about two and half weeks before the March trial date, which “raises real questions about the sincerity and actual purpose of the motion.”

Merchan noted that Trump has been claiming presidential immunity a whole lot lately. Less than two months ago, his lawyers filed an appeal with the Supreme Court to weigh in on his bid to dismiss special counsel Jack Smith’s election interference trial on the grounds of presidential immunity. His attorneys also unsuccessfully tried claiming presidential immunity last summer when pushing to move the hush money case out of state court and into federal court.

Despite having all this practice, the former president’s attorneys waited “well past the 45-day period” to file their presidential immunity defense in the hush money case, wrote Merchan, and they failed to raise it in any other pretrial motion, thereby forfeiting it. The judge’s ruling clears the way for Trump to face his first criminal trial next week.

Last week, Smith did not spare any niceties for Judge Aileen Cannon in a court filing that rejected her strategy to allow a jury to decide whether the Presidential Records Act applies to the former president’s handling of classified documents when he was leaving the White House three years ago. Two days later, Cannon responded and called Smith’s demands that she quickly make a decision on the PRA matter herself “unprecedented and unjust.”

Smith’s filing was a response to an exercise that Cannon had requested of both the prosecution and defense—come up with two scenarios for a jury to consider: 1) Is Trump’s possession of a record considered personal or presidential under the Presidential Records Act? 2) Does Trump have the sole authority to categorize any record(s) as personal or presidential during his presidency?

Trump’s attorneys have argued that the PRA gives the former president authority to reassign classified documents as personal records, and Cannon appeared open to this defense. (The PRA dictates that official records of presidents and vice presidents are officially converted from private to public when they leave office, and it gives the National Archives authority to manage those records.)

However, instead of directly ruling on the PRA defense, Cannon suggested a jury could weigh in on the question. Smith disagreed with that approach, in part because his indictment does not charge Trump with violating the PRA. “The PRA’s distinction between personal and presidential records has no bearing on whether a former President’s possession of documents containing national defense information is authorized under the Espionage Act,” wrote Smith. “And the PRA should play no role in the jury instructions.”

However, Cannon’s latest order clarifies that her jury-instructions assignment “should not be misconstrued” as her final judgment on the PRA issue, rather it was “a genuine attempt, in the context of the upcoming trial, to better understand the parties’ competing positions and the questions to be submitted to the jury in this complex case of first impressions.” She also stipulated that Smith is always free to appeal her opinions as he sees fit.

Cannon’s order also included bad news for Trump: The motion to dismiss the classified documents indictment was denied.

After a New York appeals court threw the former president a lifeline and allowed the bond in his civil fraud judgment to be lowered from $454 million to only $175 million, Trump was able to post bond. He can now proceed with appealing New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron’s verdict.

Under New York state law, defendants who are seeking an appeal—and want to stop authorities from collecting the fine they owe while the appeals process plays out—must post a bond worth the full value of the judgment. In Trump’s case, that was $454 million, the penalty levied by Engoron, who found that Trump committed fraud when he overinflated the value of his assets on financial documents. He also banned Trump from serving as an executive of any New York–based company for the next three years, and from taking out any loans from a New York financial institution.

However, Trump’s attorneys said securing a bond worth just shy of half a billion dollars was a “practical impossibility,” and they sought a lower bond amount. Once that request was granted, Trump’s attorney confirmed the former president had posted a bond worth $175 million and that “he looks forward to vindicating his rights on appeal and overturning this unjust verdict,” said Alina Habba.