Attorneys for Donald Trump told a judge in New York on Friday that they would need more than a 30-day trial delay in the former president’s hush money case to review tens of thousands of discovery documents they received this month.
They asked Judge Juan Merchan to schedule a hearing, instead of set a new trial date, so that parties in the case can review what Trump’s defense team says were discovery violations by Democratic Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, according to a court filing. The trial is currently scheduled to begin on March 25.
“An adjournment is necessary, and thirty days is not sufficient given the volume of recently produced materials and the nature of the ongoing disputes,” Trump’s attorneys wrote.
Their request for a hearing comes after they asked for a 90-day delay because of the discovery dumps. Prosecutors responded on Thursday that they believed a shorter delay of 30 days would allow defense attorneys enough time to review the new materials.
The discovery — the defense received more than 100,000 pages of documents in a couple of batches this month — came after Trump’s attorneys subpoenaed the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York in January for documents in a related case brought by the federal government against Michael Cohen.
Bragg is expected to use Cohen as a witness as he seeks to convict Trump on 34 counts of business fraud. Cohen, who worked as an attorney for Trump, pleaded guilty to eight criminal charges, including campaign finance violations, in 2018 after he paid off porn star Stormy Daniels to stay silent about a previous affair she claimed ahead of the 2016 presidential election to have had with Trump.
Trump’s attorneys said Friday that they received the discovery so late in part because Bragg’s office had attempted “to obstruct President Trump’s access to discoverable information that we should be permitted to use to challenge the credibility of their star witness, Michael Cohen.”
Prosecutors said in their own filing on Friday that most of the discovery was irrelevant to the case and that the U.S. district attorney’s office would produce one final batch containing 15,000 records by the end of the day.
“We understand that the vast majority of the forthcoming records, like the initial productions, are likely to be unrelated to the subject matter of this case and not within the People’s prior requests,” prosecutors wrote.
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Merchan has not issued any orders on a trial delay yet, but one is expected after both parties agreed at least to push it back 30 days.
Any delay would be a small victory for Trump, the leading Republican presidential candidate. He has sought delays in this case and his three other criminal cases as he juggles legal obligations and campaigning.
