Trump’s first criminal trial will start March 25, judge says

The schedule for Trump’s hush money case in New York means he will spend weeks in court instead of on the campaign trail this spring.

 

 

'There's no crime': Trump speaks before hush money hearing

 

 

 

NEW YORK — Former President Donald Trump’s first criminal trial will start on March 25 as scheduled, a judge said in New York on Thursday as he denied Trump’s attempts to throw out the charges. The case involves hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels.

The schedule means Trump will spend weeks in court instead of on the campaign trail as he pivots to a general election campaign against President Joe Biden.

“At this point, I can inform you that we’re moving ahead to jury selection on March 25,” Justice Juan Merchan said at the opening of a pretrial hearing, even as Trump’s lawyer, Todd Blanche, sought to postpone that date.

With Trump looking on from the defense table, Blanche argued aggressively against the schedule, saying the trial will come “in the middle of primary season” and calling the decision “completely election interference.”

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has charged Trump with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records connected to the hush money payments, which Trump arranged through an intermediary in the closing weeks of the 2016 presidential campaign. The payments covered up Daniels’ allegation that she had a sexual encounter with Trump.

Bragg alleges that Trump falsified the payments in the Trump Organization’s corporate records and that he never reported the money on campaign finance documents as required.

The case is one of four criminal cases that Trump is facing as he barrels toward the Republican nomination. The trial schedules for the other three cases — two for attempting to overturn the 2020 election results and one for hoarding classified documents after he left office — remain unclear.

Prosecutors in those cases are pushing to start trials before this year’s election, but Trump has sought to postpone all of the trials or have the cases dismissed entirely.

In a 30-page ruling on Thursday morning, Merchan denied Trump’s bid to dismiss the hush money charges. Trump had argued, among other things, that the prosecution was politically motivated. Those arguments, Merchan wrote, “strain credulity.”