It's a date: Trump's first felony trial will be April 15
The trial on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records is expected to last six weeks.
Business Insider
Mar 25, 2024
A Manhattan judge has set an April 15 date for jury selection in Donald Trump's hush money case, the GOP presidential frontrunner's first of four criminal trials.
At a contentious pre-trial court hearing, New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan shot down the Trump legal team's efforts to delay the trial further.
Trump and his legal team must appear in court each day of the approximately six-week trial on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.
The trial, which was originally set to start in March, had been delayed after federal prosecutors — who aren't leading this case — turned over documents to Trump's team.
Trump's lawyers and state prosecutors blamed the other for why the documents were revealed at the last minute.
Now the trial date is finally set.
At the trial, a jury will be asked to find if Trump falsified 34 invoices and Trump Organization general ledger entries in order to hide a $130,000 hush money payment to porn actress Stormy Daniels.
The payment was recorded in Trump's business records as routine legal fees paid to his then-personal attorney Michael Cohen.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg alleges the payment — made just 11 days before Trump was elected president in 2016 — was, in fact, illegal campaign expenditures meant to keep voters from hearing Daniels' account of a 2006 tryst.
Cohen pleaded guilty in 2018 to campaign finance violations in connection to the Stormy Daniels payment.
The trial will be the first of Trump's criminal cases to go to court.
The trial falls just before the start of Passover, which begins April 22 and ends April 30.
New York City schools are also on break that week.
The judge said Monday jurors' holiday concerns would be honored.
"See you all on the 15th," Merchan said.
After the hearing, Trump addressed reporters.
"This is a case that could have been brought 3 ½ years ago and now they're fighting over days because they want to try to do it during the election," Trump said. "This is election interference. That's all that is."
Trump is also awaiting trial on election interference charges in Georgia.
1 comment:
People have been reporting the TRUMP IS / WILL BE TOAST for as long as he has been around politics. So far they have all been wrong. They will be wrong this time too. He might not win, but the assertion that he was banging a porn actress and paid her off is not going to be a deal breaker IMHO for his supporters, nor for that matter for most swing voters.
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