Manhattan DA says no additional delay needed in Trump hush money criminal trial, blasts ‘grab-bag of meritless’ filings

By Kara Scannell and Jeremy Herb, CNN

(CNN) — Manhattan prosecutors say fewer than 270 documents recently turned over to Donald Trump by federal authorities are new and relevant to the criminal case involving hush money payments and no further delay to the trial is warranted.

Prosecutors with the Manhattan district attorney’s office also told the judge that no sanctions were warranted and placed the blame on Trump’s lawyers for the late disclosure of records from the US attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York.

Trump asked Judge Juan Merchan to dismiss the indictment and delay the trial for 90 days, alleging prosecutors withheld information from them involving the federal prosecution of Michael Cohen, Trump’s former fixer and a key witness for the state.

In a series of filings Thursday, the district attorney’s office accused Trump’s lawyers of trying to allege a “grab-bag of meritless discovery arguments in the latest of a long series of attempts to evade responsibility for the conduct charged in the indictment.”

“Defense counsel has likewise stretched the boundaries of zealous advocacy in this case,” the district attorney wrote.

“Defendant’s motion and subsequent filings are a transparent attempt to shift the focus away from his own criminal conduct by pursuing remedies to which he is not entitled, including dismissal, a lengthy adjournment, and preclusion of evidence,” the DA added.

The trial was set to start on March 25, but the judge postponed it to until at least April 15 over the dispute. The judge is holding a hearing on Monday to discuss the discovery issues and potentially settle on a new trial date.

Prosecutors argued the trial should not be delayed any further. Merchan is holding a hearing on March 25 to discuss the matter.

Prosecutors said a small number of the 33,000 records produced on March 13, based on their ongoing review, are new, writing the batch “contains only limited materials relevant to the subject matter of this case and that have not been disclosed to the defendant: fewer than an estimated 270 documents, most of which are inculpatory and corroborative of existing evidence.”

They went on to say Trump’s allegations of misconduct are “wholly unfounded, and the circumstances here do not come close to warranting the extreme sanctions he has sought.”

Prosecutors say they took steps to obtain records from federal prosecutors “including by requesting and obtaining extensive evidence about Cohen’s campaign finance convictions – all of which was then disclosed to defendant. Moreover, the belated nature of the recent USAO productions is entirely a result of defendant’s own inexplicable and strategic delay in identifying perceived deficiencies in the People’s disclosures and pursuing independent means to obtain that evidence.”

The DA’s office turned over materials it obtained from federal prosecutors to Trump last June, but then Trump subpoenaed the federal prosecutors in January for information about their investigation and also special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russia’s interference into the 2016 presidential election, which spun off the Cohen prosecution.

Stormy Daniels documentary at issue

The district attorney’s filings also addressed the airing of a documentary about Stormy Daniels one week before the trial was initially supposed to begin.

The documentary on Daniels aired this week on Peacock, examining Daniels’ life navigating the roller coaster that followed the public revealing of the hush money payment that ultimately landed Trump’s former attorney Cohen in federal prison for breaking campaign finance laws.

Trump has pleaded not guilty to the charges related to the hush money payments and has denied the affair with Daniels.

Trump’s attorneys have argued that the documentary is reason for the trial to be delayed because it could be prejudicial to the jury pool, while criticizing the district attorney’s office in their request for sanctions because of the “untimely” production of the documentary.

The district attorney’s office says that it turned over the documentary to Trump’s lawyers once it had obtained it, and also dismissed arguments that the documentary was an attempt to prejudice the jury ahead of trial.

“The argument rests entirely on the false claim that Ms. Daniels controlled the release date of the NBCUniversal documentary; she did not,” the district attorney writes.

The filing noted that the district attorney subpoenaed NBCUniversal for the documentary, “obtained it on the earliest available day, and produced it to defendant one business day later — before it was public.”

“That’s the polar opposite of concealment,” the district attorney argued.

200,000 pages of documents from DOJ

The filings also provide additional details on the more than 200,000 pages of discovery that the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York turned over this month – documents that prompted the judge to agree to a delay in the trial start date and to schedule Monday’s hearing to discuss the discovery issues.

The 200,000 documents were turned over in response to a subpoena from Trump’s lawyers about the SDNY investigation into Cohen, including documents relied upon to establish probable cause for search warrants, documents on Cohen’s phones and email accounts and Cohen’s proffer agreements, among others.

In addition, the district attorney’s office said it turned over in January and February notes from several of Cohen’s interviews with Mueller’s office.

The US Attorney’s office did not possess those notes in January and March 2023 when the district attorney made the initial discovery request, and the DA says in its filing they were obtained through Freedom of Information Act litigation. Redacted versions of Cohen’s interviews with Mueller have been released publicly in response to FOIA lawsuits from CNN and other news organizations.

This story and headline have been updated with additional developments.

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