‘It’s All Done by Crooked Joe Biden and the THUGS That Work for Him’: Trump Slams Judge for Setting Date for Stormy Daniels Trial

President Trump is lashing out after the judge presiding over his hush-money case kept the April 15 trial date he had previously set, and denied the defense’s request for further delay, rejecting the prosecutorial misconduct allegation. “See you all on April 15,” the New York state supreme court judge, Juan Merchan, told the court on Monday, with Mr. Trump sitting at the defense table. Mr. Trump fired back, on his social media platform, Truth Social, that this was all the work of President Biden’s legal machine. “This is all done by the Democrat Party and it’s all done by Crooked Joe Biden and the THUGS that work for him,” he wrote. “This is a very dangerous thing for our Country!”Earlier this month, Mr. Trump’s defense attorneys accused the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, who brought the charges against their client, of intentionally suppressing hundreds of thousands of pages of evidence to sabotage their case. The defense further alleged that the court was complicit in the discovery violation. On March 15, the judge moved the trial, which was supposed to start this Monday, to mid-April, and scheduled a hearing to examine the charges. “The district attorney of New York County is not at fault for the late production of documents,” Judge Merchan ruled from the bench. He found that the “people,” referring to the district attorney’s office, “made diligent, good-faith efforts” to retrieve appropriate material, that they had “complied and continued to comply” with the required procedures, and that “the court is not under the district attorney’s control.” The defendant, he added, had been given a “reasonable amount of time to prepare,” and will not suffer any harm as a result of the late disclosure of evidence. The judge concluded that the “document’s collection is completed.” While Judge Merchan announced that jury selection would begin on April 15, Mr. Trump shook his head in contempt. He will be the first former, and possibly future, president in American history to face a criminal trial. Mr. Bragg accuses Mr. Trump of concealing a $130,000 hush-money payment to an adult film star, Stormy Daniels, in an attempt to hide their alleged sexual encounter from voters during the 2016 presidential election. Mr. Trump denies the charges and the liaison. Outside the courtroom, Mr. Trump told reporters, “This is a case that could have been brought three and a half years ago. And now they’re fighting over days because they want to try and do it during the election. This is election interference. That’s all it is. Election interference and it’s a disgrace.” He added, “We’ll obviously be appealing.” His attorneys scored a minor victory when the judge allowed them to file yet another request to delay the trial. One defense attorney, Todd Blanche, said widespread pre-trial publicity had influenced the jurors’ judgment. “There’s a lot of news because he’s running for president, which is another reason why he should not have to sit for a trial now,” Mr. Blanche argued. Prosecutors found that Mr. Trump himself was engaging and profiting from the publicity, saying “the pre-trial publicity had been absorbed by the defendant.” However, they did not oppose the filing of a motion. When the judge asked the defense to further explain his intentions, Mr. Blanche said recently conducted data analysis showed how the press coverage was clouding public opinion. The judge accepted the motion, and gave prosecutors one week to respond. Yet overall Monday’s hearing was not favorable to Mr. Trump. Judge Merchan fired questions at his defense attorney, who at times seemed somewhat at a loss for answers. The discussion revolved around the “very disconcerting” accusation, as the judge phrased it, that the district attorney had kept vast amounts of evidence, which is in the possession of federal prosecutors, from the defense. As the Sun previously reported, the alleged hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, were previously investigated by federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York in 2018. Because Mr. Trump was president at that time, he could not be charged. Instead, the investigation focused on Michael Cohen, Mr. Trump’s former lawyer, who testified against his old boss and pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations and other crimes connected to the alleged hush-money payment. In response to a subpoena filed by Mr. Trump’s attorneys on January 18, both parties received hundreds of thousands of records from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District. The defense accused Mr. Bragg of “widespread misconduct” and “serious discovery violations,” saying that though prosecutors knew these records existed, they had not asked for them, and instead stuck their “heads in the sand.” This, the defense argued, should be reason enough to dismiss the entire case, or at least delay it for 90 days. “We met here on February 15,” the judge addressed Mr. Blanche, “why didn’t you bring any of this to my attention?” He added: “You were arguing that the trial should be adjourned, and it would have made sense to bring this up.” “The process was ongoing, there was no resolution at this point,” the defense attorney answered, “we hoped we would get more documents.” It wasn’t until March 4 that federal prosecutors delivered about 73,000 pages of evidence, and three more batches followed later.“How many of these documents are actually relevant to the case?” the judge asked. One of the prosecutors, Matthew Colangelo, stated that of the roughly 190,000 delivered pages, maybe 300 were “usable.” The defense “very much” disagreed, arguing that, “every document is important. … Every single one.” Judge Merchan insisted that the defense attorney tell him how many documents he still needed to review. Mr. Blanche was not able to give a precise number, “thousands and thousands and thousands,” he said, referring to emails, attachments to emails, phone records, and most of all bank statements, which could, according to him, dismiss the credibility of such star witnesses as Ms. Daniels and Cohen. In a response filing last week, prosecutors called the new evidence “a red herring,” writing, “Enough is enough,” and charging that the defendant had “taken every possible step to evade accountability in this case for more than a year.” Yet possibly most harmful to Mr. Blanche was that he could not cite case laws to substantiate his claims, nor convincingly explain why the defense had not asked for the documents before January 18. “You are literally accusing the Manhattan DA’s office and the people assigned to this case of prosecutorial misconduct and to make me complicit in it, and you don’t have a single cite to support that position,” Judge Merchan fired from the bench. Mr. Trump, who in this case is also facing the personal accusation of having engaged in an extramarital affair, kept his eyes mostly directed at the judge.During a press conference at 40 Wall St. afterward, Mr. Trump appeared confident. The trial, he said, would “make me more popular because the people know it’s a scam.”He also told reporters, “I would have no problem testifying. I didn’t do anything wrong.”Unless the April 15 date is changed again, Mr. Bragg’s criminal case will be the first of Mr. Trump’s four criminal indictments to go to trial.

‘It’s All Done by Crooked Joe Biden and the THUGS That Work for Him’: Trump Slams Judge for Setting Date for Stormy Daniels Trial

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