Former U.S. President Donald Trump speaks on the phone on the 18th green during day three of the LIV Golf Invitational – Miami at Trump National Doral Miami on April 7, 2024 in Doral, Florida.
Megan Briggs | Getty Images
Donald Trump’s latest attempt to impeach the judge in his criminal hush money case is a bad faith attempt to delay his upcoming trial and circumvent a hush order barring him from speaking about the judge’s daughter, he said Monday. the Manhattan District Attorney.
Trump’s “reheated” arguments for impeaching New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan offer nothing new compared to an earlier attempt to get a new justice, prosecutor Alvin Bragg wrote in a legal file.
Rather, Bragg argued, the current recusal motion is a “last resort” attempt to postpone the trial that appears “transparently reverse engineered” to justify Trump’s series of recent attacks on Merchan’s adult daughter.
It is “an effort to end” the order of silence and to “pollute the court” with attacks on the judge and his family “in an unfounded effort to call into question the integrity of these procedures,” Bragg wrote.
The trial is expected to begin next Monday, April 15. Trump is charged with 34 counts of falsifying business records in a scheme to conceal a secret payment to porn star Stormy Daniels in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election.
Trump’s lawyers, in court filings Friday, argued that Authentic Campaigns, the Democratic consulting firm where Merchan’s daughter works, should benefit from the hush money affair by using it to raise funds and promote an anti-Trump message.
“Personal political views may not be grounds for recusal. But profiting from promoting a political agenda hostile to President Trump, and which has included fundraising solicitations based on this case, must be “, they wrote.
Bragg, in his Monday filing, called it “pure speculation to assume that this Court’s decisions would affect Authentic’s contracts or revenues.” Even if the company raised money outside of the lawsuit, that still wouldn’t provide a sufficient basis for the judge’s recusal, Bragg added.
The complaint comes days after Merchan expanded a silence order on Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, to prohibit him from making statements about members of the judge’s family who might interfere with the case. Merchan also amended the order to prohibit Trump from speaking about Bragg’s family members.
The enhanced gag order came after Trump sent a series of social media messages targeting Merchan’s daughter, Loren Merchan, because of her political work and saying it proved the judge was biased.
Trump also accused Loren Merchan of controlling an X account that posted a photo depicting Trump behind bars in his prison cell. The New York court’s administrative office denied that the judge’s daughter controlled the account at the time he posted the photo.
Judge Merchan wrote in the order that people observing Trump’s attacks might conclude that their loved ones might be criticized if they were involved in the matter. This situation constitutes “a direct attack on the rule of law itself,” he wrote.
Last summer, the judge rejected Trump’s first request for recusal, which also focused on Loren Merchan’s political activities.
Bragg, in his Monday filing, argued that Trump’s current recusal motion makes “identical” arguments, adding that the few points it includes that have not been raised before are “totally without merit.”
The hush money case is expected to be the first of Trump’s four criminal cases to go to trial. The former president’s lawyers have repeatedly tried to dismiss or delay all of those cases while he runs to unseat Democratic incumbent Joe Biden.
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