In new arguments filed in court, Manhattan prosecutors behind one of the four criminal cases facing ex-President Donald Trump lambasted the idea of further delaying the trial, which will cover accusations of the criminal falsification of business records related to hush money given to a woman named Stormy Daniels before the 2016 elections.
“Defendant’s motion and subsequent filings are a transparent attempt to shift the focus away from his own criminal conduct by pursuing remedies to which he is not entitled, including dismissal, a lengthy adjournment, and preclusion of evidence,” local prosecutors said, as highlighted by CNN.
There’s a hearing scheduled for Monday at which the judge will consider the latest developments around the trial scheduling question. The case, in which Trump is the only defendant, was originally set to head to a jury this month, but it was put on hold until at least the middle of the next after a late release of evidentiary materials from a federal prosecutor’s office. Prosecutors on the case against Trump argued only a small portion of evidentiary documents most recently at issue constituted something new and seriously relevant to the case.
Trump’s legal team has also pointed in their push for effectively punting the proceedings to a recent documentary featuring Daniels, but prosecutors rebuffed this line of argument as well.
The idea from the Trump team was both that the documentary could prove prejudicial among potential jurors and that prosecutors allegedly perpetrated an undue delay in how they eventually turned over the documentary to Trump’s defense for review before trial as part of the discovery process. Prejudice, in this context, refers to particular bias against what’s this time Trump, though the ordinary processes of jury selection provide the opportunity to screen potential participants for such a stance. Prosecutors said the idea they’d meaningfully held back in producing the documentary for the Trump defense just wasn’t true. They apparently produced the work for Trump’s team before its public release.
