A Manhattan prosecutor will not be punished for allegedly destroying documents at the last minute that led to former President Donald Trump’s bribery. quiet money criminal trial A later-than-scheduled start date was ruled Thursday by a judge.
Judge Juan Merchan denied a defense request to impose sanctions on prosecutors over the deluge of nearly 200,000 pages of evidence. Just weeks before the trial was scheduled to begin.. The documents came from a previous federal investigation into the matter.
Merchan agreed to delay the start of the trial from March 25 to April 15 to allow the former president’s attorneys to review the material. But at a hearing in March, he dismissed claims that the case was tainted by prosecutorial misconduct and rejected their proposals to delay the case longer, dismiss it entirely or exclude key prosecution witnesses. michael cohen and stormy daniels From testimony.
In his ruling released Thursday, Merchant reiterated that Trump and his attorneys suffered no prejudice as a result of the destruction of the documents because “they were given reasonable time to prepare and respond.”
Merchan said he reached the conclusion after reviewing written submissions from both sides, including a timeline for recording discovery and arguments and explanations made at a March 25 hearing on the matter.
The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office declined to comment on the ruling. A message seeking comment was left with Trump’s legal team.
After 22 witnesses, including Cohen and Daniels, testified over the past month, the former president’s first criminal trial is expected to move to closing arguments next Tuesday, followed by jury deliberations as early as Wednesday.
Trump’s lawyers have accused Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg of intentionally failing to track down evidence in a 2018 federal investigation. sent Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen is in jail.
They argued that prosecutors from Bragg, a Democrat, did so to gain an unfair advantage in the case and undermine Trump’s chances of winning. Cohen, now an active critic of Trump, was a key prosecution witness against his former boss.
At a March 25 hearing, Merchan said the prosecutor’s office has no obligation to collect evidence in the federal investigation and the U.S. attorney’s office has no obligation to volunteer documents. The judge said it was “an entirely different thing” for “Manhattan prosecutors to insert themselves into the process and vigorously and aggressively try to impede your ability to obtain documents.”
“It didn’t just happen like that,” Merchan said.
The prosecutor’s office denied any wrongdoing and accused Trump’s lawyers of waiting until January 18 to subpoena records from the U.S. attorney’s office. This is just nine weeks before the trial was originally scheduled to begin. Merchan said if he thought the defense didn’t have all the records he wanted, he should have acted sooner.
Trump has pleaded not guilty to a charge of falsifying business records by falsely recording legal fees in the company’s books as payments to Cohen, then his private attorney, for allegedly paying $130,000 in hush money to Daniels. Manhattan prosecutors say Trump did this in an effort to protect his 2016 campaign by burying false stories about extramarital sex.
Trump’s lawyers said the payments to Cohen were legitimate legal expenses and not concealed checks. Trump has denied having a sexual relationship with Daniels.
Cohen pleaded guilty in 2018 to federal campaign finance violations related to Daniels’ compensation. He said Trump had not been indicted, even though Trump had told him to arrange the case and federal prosecutors had said they believed him.
