The Manhattan district attorney prosecuting Donald Trump’s hush money case is fed up with the former president’s attempts to further delay the trial, saying “enough is enough” in court filings Thursday calling for the trial to start next month.
The filing from Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s office concerns a trove of newly disclosed records that Trump’s legal team says could be integral to the case and need extensive review over the next several months.
But Bragg’s office said Thursday that of the 170,000-plus documents ― which his staff disclosed after receiving them from federal prosecutors who previously investigated Trump lawyer Michael Cohen ― fewer than 300 are relevant to Trump’s defense.
“The overwhelming majority of the production is entirely immaterial, duplicative or substantially duplicative of previously disclosed materials, or cumulative of evidence concerning Michael Cohen’s unrelated federal convictions that defendant has been on notice about for months,” Bragg’s office argued in one of the filings.
“Although that review is still ongoing, the People now have good reason to believe that this production contains only limited materials relevant to the subject matter of this case,” the filing reiterated.
Efforts by Trump’s legal team to delay the trial until this summer come after prosecutors already agreed to push its March start date to April 15.
“Enough is enough,” Bragg’s office said in its filing.
Bragg also responded to claims by Trump’s legal team that the case should be dropped and Bragg should be sanctioned for belatedly disclosing the documents. The DA’s office said that fault lies with Trump’s team for waiting until the eleventh hour to subpoena the records from the Southern District of New York, where Cohen was prosecuted and found guilty in 2018.
“Ultimately, defendant’s focus on purported discovery violations is a red herring,” Tuesday’s filing said, calling the timing of the documents’ release “entirely a result of defendant’s own inexplicable and strategic delay in identifying perceived deficiencies in the People’s disclosures.”
The trial Trump’s team is trying to delay concerns 34 felony charges of falsifying business records, stemming from hush money payments made to adult film star Stormy Daniels in the days leading up to the 2016 election. Daniels says Cohen, on behalf of Trump, paid her a sum of $130,000 in exchange for her silence on an affair she had with Trump in 2006.
Last month, Trump alerted the Manhattan court that he plans to cite the “advice of lawyers” in the hush money case and will argue that he didn’t commit any wrongdoing because his lawyers were involved in his conduct.
Trump has pleaded not guilty on all charges in the hush money case, just as he’s done in the three other criminal indictments against him. In total, he faces 91 felony charges.