NEW YORK — A New York state judge ruled Monday that the criminal trial against former President Donald Trump stemming from a hush money payment he allegedly made to a porn actor can proceed, denying Trump’s request to have the case delayed further or altogether dismissed.
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Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, sat alongside his lawyers as Judge Juan Merchan announced that jury selection in the case would begin on April 15.
The trial — the first-ever criminal trial of a former president — had originally been scheduled to start Monday but was delayed one month after prosecutors agreed to allow Trump’s defense attorneys to review some 100,000 pages of documents of potential new evidence.
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Trump’s lawyers had sought to have the trial delayed for an additional 90 days or to have the charges altogether dismissed over what they argued were “violations” of the discovery process, alleging the office of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg had failed to hand over evidence to the defense team in a timely fashion. This, Trump’s lawyers alleged, was a deliberate attempt to bury potentially exculpatory evidence and amounted to “widespread misconduct.”
But prosecutors argued that the new tranche of documents contained little evidence relevant to the case and didn’t require a further postponement of the trial. Prosecutors received the documents in question earlier this month from the U.S. Attorney’s office in Manhattan, the federal prosecutors who investigated Trump’s alleged hush money payments but decided not to charge the former president.
The documents are related to Michael Cohen, the former Trump lawyer and fixer turned state witness. Prosecutors allege Trump instructed Cohen to give porn actress Stormy Daniels $130,000 before the 2016 election to stop her from publicizing a story about an extramarital sexual encounter she claims to have had with the former president a decade prior. Trump denies the tryst took place.
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