Delay tactics and quick trips: Takeaways from two Trump case hearings in New York and Georgia

NEW YORK — NEW YORK (AP) — Donald Trump’s unprecedented tangle of overlapping trials was on full display Thursday with simultaneous court hearings in New York and Georgia.

In Manhattan, a judge ruled that Trump’s hush money trial will begin on March 25, making it the first of his charges to go to trial. So there are 39 days left before he becomes the first former president in American history to be tried on criminal charges.

By then, Trump could very well have won enough Republican delegates to be his party’s presumptive nominee.

In Atlanta, attorneys questioned a special prosecutor about the Georgia election interference charge against Trump over the prosecutor’s romantic relationship with Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, in an effort to get Willis and her office off the case.

Tuesday’s hearings provided a preview of what a general election campaign will look like as Trump flies back and forth between courtrooms and campaign rallies, blurring the lines between the two.

On the way to the court in New York, Trump proclaimed his innocence, but raised what will be the fundamental question of the future presidential campaign.

“How can you run for office if you spend all day in a courthouse in Manhattan?†he asked.

Here are other insights from two courtrooms on Thursday:

As they have done with all of his cases, Trump’s lawyers have argued forcefully to delay the proceedings, citing the political calendar and Trump’s other cases, including one in Washington over his efforts to overturn the outcome of the election. 2020, which has effectively been suspended pending the outcome. of a profession.

Trump lawyer Todd Blanche repeatedly called the March 25 date unfair and unrealistic and asked Judge Juan Merchan to wait before making a decision. It would be impossible, he argued, for Trump and his lawyers to adequately prepare given the combined “millions of pages of discovery” in Trump’s cases.

Blanche echoed Trump’s long-standing claims of politicization, claiming that being forced to sit in a courtroom during the primaries amounted to “election interference.”

“The fact that we are now going to spend, President Trump is going to spend the next two months working on this process instead of on the campaign trail to become president, is something that should not happen in this country. Blanche said.

Merchan rejected his arguments.

The trial in New York will take about six weeks, according to Merchan. That means Trump is expected to appear in court from March 25 through about the first week of May from 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. every day except Wednesday.

Asked how he planned to balance the campaign trail with the trial, Trump told reporters he will campaign tonight.

“We just have to figure it out. “I will be here during the day and campaign at night,” he said.

In reality, that’s not much different from what he’s been doing all along.

He went to court in New York on Tuesday after holding a rally the night before in South Carolina, where the next Republican primaries will take place on February 24.

During his campaign, Trump has maintained a much lighter campaign schedule than most of his Republican rivals. For many weeks, he hosts just one or two public events — a schedule that his last remaining rival, Nikki Haley, has tried to highlight. She noted that Trump’s Wednesday visit to her home state was only his second in 80 days.

Trump has also repeatedly chosen to appear in court even when not necessary. He spent days voluntarily pursuing his civil fraud case in New York and a defamation case that ended with him being ordered to pay another $83.3 million to writer E. Jean Carroll after a jury found him liable for sexually abusing her.

The hearing in Atlanta, meanwhile, took on the tone of a soap opera, even without Trump present. Thousands of people watched livestreams online and on cable news. And ‘Fani Willis’ was a trending topic on Google and X, formerly Twitter.

A former friend and colleague of Willis, the chief Fulton County prosecutor, testified that there was “no doubt” that Willis and Wade were involved in a romantic relationship after seeing the two hugging and kissing years before he was hired as special prosecutor and before he officially filed for divorce.

Nathan Wade, the special prosecutor, filed for divorce in 2021 but told the court his marriage was “irretrievably broken” in 2015 when his wife had an affair. They agreed, he said, to stay together until their children left home for college.

Ashleigh Merchant, the attorney for Trump co-defendant Michael Roman who filed the removal request, asked about the travel and expenses Willis and Wade had incurred together and whether Willis had made restitution. Wade was asked if he ever talked about their relationship with other people.

“We’re private people,†Wade said. “Our relationship was not a secret, just private.”

Another attorney questioned Wade about when he began having “sexual relations” with Willis, who acknowledged during questioning that he had had sex with Willis during his divorce from his estranged wife, even though he had claimed that was not the case was in the divorce filings. .

The hours of questioning played into a long-standing Trump strategy as investigations were conducted. He has highlighted extramarital affairs and other personal details of investigators, agents, prosecutors and judges he considers enemies in attempts to publicly discredit and humiliate them.

Willis took the stand immediately after Wade and immediately accused Merchant, co-defendant Roman’s attorney, of repeatedly lying and falsely seeking salacious details about her personal life.

“It’s very offensive when someone lies to you, and it’s very offensive when they try to imply that you slept with someone the first day you met them, and I object to that,” she told Merchant. .

Willis often confronted Merchant during the testimony, repeatedly accusing her of lying and exasperatedly stating that the attorney was not listening to her answers.

“I’m not a hostile witness,” Willis said before the judge said she was an “adversarial witness” who opposed the attorney.

She testified at length about her romantic relationship with Wade, detailing how much she paid for flights to Miami and how he liked wine while she preferred Gray Goose vodka. She said their relationship ended last summer, but they remained friends.

As Merchant tried to get more details, Willis was visibly angry and her voice grew louder.

“Do you think I’m on trial? These people are on trial for trying to steal the 2020 election,” she said. “I am not on trial, no matter how hard you try to bring me to justice.”

Thursday’s hearings underscored how Trump had made his court appearances the heart of his campaign message. The strategy has been successful in a Republican Party primary season filled with voters who overwhelmingly supported him.

But it is unclear whether the tactic will be as effective in a general election. The suburban and independent voters Trump must convince are much more wary of electing a man who could be a convicted felon by the time both parties hold their conventions this summer.

Still, Trump could be heartened by the fact that what is widely seen as his weakest lawsuit will now come first. The case, which centers on years of allegations that Trump tried to bury stories of extramarital affairs that emerged during his 2016 presidential campaign, is complicated and carries far less severe penalties than his other cases, including charges in Florida related to the hoarding of top secret documents.

Haley’s campaign, meanwhile, sought to capitalize on the hearings, with her spokeswoman Olivia Perez-Cubas noting that while Trump was in a New York courtroom, “Nikki was heading to Texas to raise more money and campaign in the Super Tuesday. state.â€

“That, in a nutshell, is what voters can expect from the two candidates. Someone plagued by chaos, drama and personal grievances. And someone else who understands what’s at stake, fights to earn every vote, and who puts everything on the line for this country,” she said.

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Gomez Licon reported from Miami. Associated Press writers Michael R. Sisak, Jennifer Peltz and Jake Offenhartz in New York and Kate Brumback in Atlanta contributed to this report.