NEW YORK — A judge on Friday postponed former President Donald Trump’s hush-money trial until at least mid-April, after his lawyers said they needed more time to sift through a plethora of evidence they had only recently obtained from an earlier federal investigation into the case .
Judge Juan Manuel Merchan agreed to a 30-day delay and scheduled a hearing for March 25 to answer questions about the evidence dump. The trial was scheduled to begin on March 25. It is one of four criminal charges against Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee for 2024.
Trump’s lawyers wanted a 90-day delay, which would have pushed the start of the trial to early summer. Prosecutors said they agreed to a 30-day delay “out of an abundance of caution and to ensure the suspect has sufficient time to review the new materials.”
Trump’s lawyers said they have received tens of thousands of pages of evidence in the past two weeks from the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan, which investigated the hush-money scheme while Trump was president.
The evidence includes details about former Trump lawyer and prosecution witness Michael Cohen, which are “exculpatory and beneficial to the defense,” Trump’s lawyers said. Prosecutors said most of the newly transferred material is “largely irrelevant to the subject matter of this case,” although some documents are relevant.
The hush money case centers on allegations that Trump falsified his company’s records to conceal the true nature of payments to Cohen, who paid porn actor Stormy Daniels $130,000 during the 2016 presidential campaign to back up her claims of an extramarital sexual encounter with Trump years earlier to suppress.
Trump pleaded not guilty last year to 34 felony counts of falsifying company records and has denied having a sexual encounter with Daniels. His lawyers argue that the payments to Cohen were legitimate legal fees and not part of a cover-up.
Prosecutors allege Trump’s lawyers created the evidence problem by waiting until Jan. 18 — just nine weeks before the scheduled start of jury selection — to subpoena the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the entire file.
District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office said it requested the full file last year, but the U.S. attorney’s office has only turned over some of the files. Trump’s lawyers received that material last June and had ample time to seek additional evidence from the federal investigation, the district attorney’s office said.
Brief trial delays due to evidence issues are not unusual, but any delay in a case involving Trump would be significant, with trial dates in his other criminal cases still looming and Election Day less than eight months away is.
The defense has also sought to delay the trial until after the Supreme Court rules on Trump’s presidential immunity claims, which his lawyers say could apply to some of the allegations and evidence in the hush money case. The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on April 25.
Trump has repeatedly tried to delay his criminal trials as he campaigns to retake the White House.
“We want a delay,” Trump told reporters as he attended a hearing in New York on February 15. “It is clear that I am running for election. How can you run for office if you spend all day in a courthouse in Manhattan?”
