{"id":27494,"date":"2024-04-04T04:17:31","date_gmt":"2024-04-04T08:17:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/?p=27494"},"modified":"2024-04-04T04:17:31","modified_gmt":"2024-04-04T08:17:31","slug":"judge-rejects-donald-trumps-request-to-delay-hush-money-trial-until-supreme-court-rules-on-immunity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/2024\/04\/04\/judge-rejects-donald-trumps-request-to-delay-hush-money-trial-until-supreme-court-rules-on-immunity\/","title":{"rendered":"Judge rejects Donald Trump’s request to delay hush-money trial until Supreme Court rules on immunity"},"content":{"rendered":"

NEW YORK (AP) \u2014 A judge on Wednesday rejected Donald Trump\u2019s bid to delay his April 15\u00a0hush money criminal trial<\/a><\/span>\u00a0until the Supreme Court rules on presidential immunity claims he raised in another of his criminal cases \u2014 spurning another of the former president\u2019s ploys to put off the historic trial. Several more are pending.<\/p>\n

Manhattan Judge Juan M. Merchan declared the request untimely, ruling that Trump\u2019s lawyers had \u201cmyriad opportunities\u201d to raise the immunity issue before they finally did so last month, well after a deadline for pretrial motions had already passed.<\/p>\n

The timing of the defense\u2019s March 7 filing \u201craises real questions about the sincerity and actual purpose of the motion,\u201d Merchan wrote in a six-page decision.<\/p>\n

Lawyers for Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, had asked Merchan to adjourn the New York trial indefinitely until Trump\u2019s immunity claim in his Washington, D.C., election interference case is resolved.<\/p>\n

Trump contends he is immune from prosecution for conduct alleged to involve official acts during his tenure in office. His lawyers have not raised that as a defense in the hush-money case, but they argued that some evidence \u2014 including Trump\u2019s social media posts about former lawyer Michael Cohen \u2014 is from his time as president and should be excluded from the trial because of his immunity protections.<\/p>\n

The Supreme Court is\u00a0scheduled to hear arguments on April 25<\/a><\/span>\u00a0\u2014 a week-and-a-half after the start of jury selection in the hush-money case.<\/p>\n

Trump lawyer Todd Blanche declined to comment. The Manhattan district attorney\u2019s office also declined to comment.<\/p>\n

Trump first raised the immunity issue in his Washington criminal case, which involves allegations that he worked\u00a0to overturn the results<\/a><\/span>\u00a0of his 2020 election loss in the run-up to the\u00a0violent riot<\/a><\/span>\u00a0by his supporters at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.<\/p>\n

Merchan, in his ruling, drew a distinction between the Washington case \u2014 which he referred to as the Federal Insurrection Matter \u2014 and the hush-money case he\u2019s overseeing.<\/p>\n

In Washington, Trump is trying to use presidential immunity to get the charges thrown out on the grounds that he has \u201cabsolute immunity from federal criminal liability,\u201d the judge wrote. In the hush-money case, he said, Trump is trying to preclude evidence of what prosecutors said was his \u201cpressure campaign\u201d against Cohen and other witnesses.<\/p>\n

The hush money case centers on allegations that Trump falsified his company\u2019s internal records to hide the true nature of payments to his former lawyer Michael Cohen, who helped Trump bury negative stories during his 2016 presidential campaign. Among other things, Cohen paid porn actor Stormy Daniels $130,000 to suppress her claims of an extramarital sexual encounter with Trump years earlier.<\/p>\n

Trump\u00a0pleaded not guilty<\/a><\/span>\u00a0last year to\u00a034 felony counts<\/a><\/span>\u00a0of falsifying business records. He has denied having a sexual encounter with Daniels, and his lawyers argue the payments to Cohen were legitimate legal expenses and not part of any cover-up.<\/p>\n

The hush-money trial, the first of Trump\u2019s four criminal cases scheduled to go before a jury, was originally scheduled to begin March 25. Merchan postponed it until April 15 after Trump\u2019s lawyers complained about a last-minute document dump from a prior federal investigation into the matter that sent Cohen to prison.<\/p>\n

Trump and his lawyers have continued to lobby for even more delays, parlaying gripes about Merchan and concerns about getting a fair trial in heavily Democratic Manhattan into eleventh-hour pleas for more time. It\u2019s the latest iteration of the strategy Trump proclaimed to TV cameras outside a pretrial hearing in February: \u201cWe want delays.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s lawyers are again urging Merchan to step aside from the case, arguing in a letter to the judge this week that he may have a conflict of interest because of his daughter\u2019s work as a Democratic political consultant. Merchan rejected a similar recusal request last year. If he were to exit now, it would throw the trial schedule into disarray, with time needed to assign a new judge and get that person up to speed.<\/p>\n

In other recent filings, Trump\u2019s lawyers argued that the trial should be delayed indefinitely until \u201cprejudicial media coverage\u201d of the case dissipates. They also contend that by seeking to make the case about the 2016 election, prosecutors in the liberal borough are \u201cendeavoring to give jurors an opportunity for a referendum\u201d on Trump\u2019s win in that race.<\/p>\n

Prosecutors balked at that Wednesday, arguing that publicity about the unprecedented trial of the former president is \u201cunlikely to recede\u201d anytime soon. They blamed Trump\u2019s \u201cown incessant rhetoric\u201d for generating significant publicity, adding that \u201cit would be perverse\u201d to reward him with a delay \u201cbased on media attention he is actively seeking.\u201d<\/p>\n

Prosecutors said the jury selection process \u2014 with additional questions designed to weed out biased prospects \u2014 will allow both sides to pick an impartial jury.<\/p>\n

In his ruling Wednesday, Merchan wrote that Trump\u2019s failure to raise the immunity issue sooner strained credulity since the former president\u2019s lawyers had previously invoked presidential immunity in a failed bid last year to get the hush-money case moved from state court to federal court.<\/p>\n

U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein rejected Trump\u2019s claim<\/a>\u00a0that allegations in the hush money indictment involved official duties, writing last July, \u201cThe evidence overwhelmingly suggests that the matter was a purely a personal item of the President \u2014 a cover-up of an embarrassing event.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHush money paid to an adult film star is not related to a President\u2019s official acts. It does not reflect in any way the color of the President\u2019s official duties,\u201d Hellerstein added.<\/p>\n

The question of whether a former president is immune from federal prosecution for official acts taken in office is legally untested.<\/p>\n

Prosecutors in the Washington case have said no such immunity exists and that, in any event, none of the actions alleged in the indictment count as official acts. The trial judge in Washington and a federal appeals court have both ruled against Trump.<\/p>\n

Associated Press reporter Jennifer Peltz contributed to this report.<\/p>\n

Source: \u00a0\"Associated<\/a> apnews.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

NEW YORK (AP) \u2014 A judge on Wednesday rejected Donald Trump\u2019s bid to delay his April 15\u00a0hush money criminal trial\u00a0until the Supreme Court rules on presidential immunity claims he raised in another of his criminal […]<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":26184,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2,3],"tags":[285,7591,521],"class_list":{"0":"post-27494","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-news","8":"category-usa","9":"tag-donald-trump","10":"tag-hush-money","11":"tag-new-york","12":"pmpro-has-access"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27494","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27494"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27494\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27496,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27494\/revisions\/27496"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26184"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27494"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27494"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27494"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}