Donald Trump sued the judge overseeing his New York criminal trial a week before it’s scheduled to begin. According to multiple reports, Trump filed the lawsuit against Judge Juan Merchan in hopes of delaying the trial.
Trump faced trial for falsifying business records to cover up an affair with adult film star Stormy Daniels. Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen made a $130,000 payment to Daniels to prevent her from publicizing details of the affair before the 2016 presidential election.
The ex-president pleaded not guilty to 34 counts of falsification of business records. His trial was supposed to begin in March, but it was delayed due to his lawyers protesting the prosecution’s handling of pretrial discovery. Judge Merchan pushed back the start date to April 15.
Trump wanted a longer delay or the dismissal of his criminal case. Judge Merchan rejected Trump’s request.
“[Prosecutors] went so far above and beyond what they were required to do that really it’s odd that we’re even here taking this time,” the judge said at a March 25 hearing.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg contested Trump’s latest attempt to delay the trial. Bragg said Trump rehashed arguments for “seeking recusal based on the employment of a family member of the Court,” which were already denied.
“Defendant’s motion is not a good-faith effort to identify legitimate grounds for this Court’s recusal,” Bragg wrote. “Instead, this motion is no more than an effort to end-run the order restricting extrajudicial speech and pollute the court file with ad hominem attacks against the Court and the Court’s family as part of a meritless effort to call the integrity of these proceedings into question. And the motion is yet another last-ditch attempt to address defendant’s real objective, which is—as the Court has already recognized—to delay this proceeding indefinitely. As this Court has repeatedly held, there is no valid ground to avoid or adjourn the forthcoming trial. Defendant’s current motion should be denied.”
Trump awaited trial for criminal charges in New York and elsewhere. He was also indicted in two federal cases and a state case in Georgia.
