NEW YORK — NEW YORK (AP) — Donald Trump arrived at a New York court Thursday for a hearing that could decide whether the former president’s first criminal trial will begin in just 39 days.
The hearing to determine whether Trump’s March 25 hush-money trial date will stand will be held in the same Manhattan courtroom where he pleaded not guilty last April to 34 charges of falsifying business records in an alleged scheme to falsify stories of extramarital affairs. to bury affairs that arose during his tenure. 2016 presidential campaign.
Trump entered the courthouse shortly before 9 a.m
It was Trump’s first return visit to court in the New York criminal case since that historic indictment made him the first ex-president charged with a crime. He has also since been charged in Florida, Georgia and Washington, DC. In recent weeks he has combined campaign events with court hearings, attending a closed hearing on Monday in a Florida case in which he was accused of hoarding classified documents.
Judge Juan Manuel Merchan has taken steps in recent weeks to prepare for a trial. If it goes as planned, this would be Trump’s first criminal case to go to trial.
Over the past year, Trump has blasted Merchan as a “Trump-hating judge,” asked him to recuse himself and tried to move the case from state court to federal court, all without success. Merchan has admitted to making several small donations to Democrats, including $15 to Trump’s rival Joe Biden, but said he is confident in his “ability to be fair and impartial.”
Thursday’s proceedings are part of a busy, overlapping series of legal activities for the Republican presidential candidate, who has increasingly made court involvement part of his political campaign.
The recent postponement of a March 4 trial date in Trump’s election interference case in Washington, D.C., has removed a major hurdle to getting the case started on time in New York.
Just as the hearing in New York gets underway, a judge in Atlanta will hear arguments Thursday on whether Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis should be disqualified from Trump’s election interference case in Georgia because of a “personal relationship” with Nathan. Wade, a special prosecutor she hired for the case.
Trump is also awaiting a decision, possibly as soon as Friday, in a civil fraud case in New York that threatens to upend his real estate empire. If the judge convicts Trump, who is accused of inflating his wealth to defraud banks, insurers and others, he could face millions of dollars in fines in addition to other sanctions.
In addition to clarifying the trial schedule, Merchan is also expected to rule on key issues in the pretrial, including a request by Trump’s lawyers to throw out the case, which they have labeled in court filings as a “taken-apart package of politically motivated charges’. marred by legal flaws.â€
Trump’s lawyers, Todd Blanche and Susan Necheles, accuse District Attorney Alvin Bragg, a Manhattan Democrat, of bringing the case to hinder Trump’s chances of regaining the White House. Bragg’s predecessor, Cyrus Vance Jr., declined to pursue a case on the same charges.
The charges carry a prison sentence of up to four years, although there is no guarantee a conviction will result in prison time.
The case centers on payouts to two women, porn actor Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal, as well as a Trump Tower doorman who claimed to have a story about Trump having a child out of wedlock. Trump says he did not have any of the alleged sexual encounters.
Trump’s then-lawyer, Michael Cohen, paid Daniels $130,000 and arranged for the publisher of the National Enquirer supermarket tabloid to pay McDougal $150,000 in a practice known as catch-and-kill.
Trump’s company then paid Cohen $420,000 and recorded the payments as legal fees, not reimbursements, prosecutors said. Bragg accused Trump last year of falsifying internal records kept by his company, the Trump Organization, to conceal the true nature of payments.
Trump’s legal team has argued that no crime was committed.
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