Former US President Donald Trump sits in the courtroom during a hearing in his criminal case on charges related to money paid to a porn star in New York, the United States, March 25 2024.
Brendan McDermid | Reuters
Jury selection in Donald Trump’s secret criminal trial will begin April 15, a New York judge ruled during a court hearing Monday.
Judge Juan Merchan issued his ruling after strongly rejecting arguments from Trump’s lawyers who tried to delay the trial. Trump is accused in the case of falsifying business records in an effort to silence women who say they had affairs with him.
“The fact that you don’t have a case at this point is really disconcerting,” Merchan told the former president’s lawyers, referring to their claim that prosecutors in the case suppressed evidence.
“You are literally accusing the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office and the people assigned to this case of prosecutorial misconduct,” Merchan said. “You say the people assigned to this case participate in prosecutorial misconduct, and you have no citations to support that allegation.”
Trump was in the courtroom listening to Merchan present a harsh assessment to his legal team.
Trump called the case a “witch hunt” and a “hoax” as he entered the Manhattan Supreme Court courtroom.
At a news conference after the hearing ended, Trump said he would be willing to testify in his defense. But he added that he thought the case might not go to trial at all.
“I don’t know if you’re going to stand trial,” he said. “I don’t know how we can have a trial like this in the middle of an election, a presidential election.”
The hearing came just as a New York appeals court sharply reduced the amount Trump had to agree to stay a $454 million fine in a separate civil case.
Trump was facing a financial reckoning from New York Attorney General Letitia James, who as of Monday was poised to begin collecting that massive judgment. The presumptive Republican presidential candidate was unable to provide cash to cover the entire judgment in order to secure the bond.
But during the lunch break of Monday’s hearing, a panel of appeals judges reduced Trump’s bail to $175 million, significantly reducing the amount of money he will have to post. The panel gave Trump 10 days to post bail.
As he re-entered Merchan’s courtroom, Trump told reporters, “I greatly respect the decision of the Appellate Division.” He then denounced the judge who handed down the $454 million verdict, calling it a “disgrace to this country.”
The hush money case was previously scheduled to go to trial on Monday, but was postponed until at least mid-April after Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said March 14 that he would not did not object to a 30-day delay to give Trump time to review a tranche of recently submitted documents.
Trump’s lawyers previously asked Merchan to either dismiss Bragg’s indictment entirely or delay the trial for at least 90 days, arguing that the DA’s office improperly provided them with tens of thousands of pages of documents with little time to prepare.
But Bragg resisted, telling Merchan that the late arrival of these documents “is the result solely of the defendant’s delay despite the diligence of the People.”
During Monday’s hearing, the judge was very skeptical of Trump’s lawyers.
“You started off by saying that somehow the prosecutor was obstructive,” Merchan said. “That’s just not what happened.”
Trump, who is battling four active criminal cases and several costly civil cases as he races to unseat Democratic President Joe Biden, had lashed out at the fraud case and the hush money case before the hearing on Monday.
The penalty in civil matters “should be ZERO, I DID NOTHING WRONG!” Trump wrote on his social media site Truth Social.
“The DA case, which I will address today, should be closed. No crime. Our country is CORRUPT!” he added in the same message.
Bragg’s indictment charges Trump with 34 counts of falsifying business records to hide information harmful to voters before the 2016 presidential election.
The case centers on a $130,000 payment made to porn star Stormy Daniels less than two weeks before the election, which Trump would win against Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.
That payment, made by Michael Cohen, Trump’s then-lawyer, was intended to buy Daniels’ silence about an extramarital affair she said she had with Trump years earlier, Bragg’s indictment says.
Cohen has since pleaded guilty to making an illegal campaign contribution, which he said he did at Trump’s direction. Cohen has become a vocal enemy of Trump and is set to testify in the secret trial.
Trump has denied having sex with Daniels. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges.
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