Judge delays Donald Trump’s hush-money criminal trial for 30 days

A judge on Friday delayed former US president Donald Trump’s hush-money criminal trial until at least mid-April after his lawyers said they needed more time to sift through evidence they only recently obtained.

Judge Juan Manuel Merchan agreed to a 30-day postponement and scheduled a hearing for March 25 to address questions about the evidence dump.

The trial had been due to start on March 25. It is among four criminal indictments against Mr Trump, the presumptive 2024 Republican presidential nominee.

Mr Trump’s lawyers wanted a 90-day delay, which would have pushed the start of the trial into the early summer.

Prosecutors said they were happy with a 30-day adjournment “in an abundance of caution and to ensure that defendant has sufficient time to review the new materials”.

Mr Trump’s lawyers said they have received tens of thousands of pages of evidence in the last two weeks from the US attorney’s office in Manhattan, which investigated the alleged hush money arrangement while Mr Trump was president.

The evidence includes records about former Trump lawyer-turned-prosecution witness Michael Cohen that are “exculpatory and favourable to the defence,” Mr Trump’s lawyers said.

Prosecutors said most of the newly turned over material is “largely irrelevant to the subject matter of this case”, though some records are pertinent.

The hush money case centres on allegations that Mr Trump falsified his company’s records to hide the true nature of payments to Cohen, who paid adult film actor Stormy Daniels 130,000 dollars (£102,000) during the 2016 presidential campaign to suppress her claims of an extramarital sexual encounter with Mr Trump years earlier.

Mr Trump pleaded not guilty last year to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records and has denied having a sexual encounter with Ms Daniels. His lawyers argue the payments to Cohen were legitimate legal expenses and were not part of any cover-up.

Prosecutors contend Mr Trump’s lawyers caused the evidence problem by waiting until January 18 — a mere nine weeks before the scheduled start of jury selection — to subpoena the US attorney’s office for the full case file.

District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office said it requested the full file last year but the US attorney’s office turned over only a subset of records. Mr Trump’s lawyers received that material last June and had ample time to seek additional evidence from the federal probe, the district attorney’s office said.

Short trial delays because of issues with evidence are not unusual, but any delay in a case involving Mr Trump would be significant, with trial dates in his other criminal cases up in the air and election day less than eight months away.

The defence has also sought to delay the trial until after the Supreme Court rules on Mr Trump’s presidential immunity claims, which his lawyers say could apply to some of the allegations and evidence in the hush money case. The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear oral arguments April 25.

Mr Trump has repeatedly sought to postpone his criminal trials while he campaigns to retake the White House.

“We want delays,” Mr Trump told reporters as he headed into a February 15 hearing in New York. “Obviously I’m running for election. How can you run for election if you’re sitting in a courthouse in Manhattan all day long?”