Trump hush-money trial delayed for 30 days as lawyers review new evidence

A judge on Friday delayed Donald Trump’s hush-money criminal trial until at least mid-April after the former president’s lawyers said they needed more time to sift through a profusion of evidence they only recently obtained from a previous federal investigation into the matter.

Judge Juan Manuel Merchan agreed to a 30-day postponement and scheduled a hearing for 25 March to address questions about the evidence dump. The trial had been slated to start on 25 March. It is among four criminal indictments against Trump, the presumptive 2024 Republican presidential nominee.

Trump’s lawyers wanted a 90-day delay, which would have pushed the start of the trial into the early summer. Prosecutors said they were OK with a 30-day adjournment “in an abundance of caution and to ensure that defendant has sufficient time to review the new materials”.

Trump’s lawyers said they have received tens of thousands of pages of evidence in the last two weeks from the US attorney’s office in Manhattan, which investigated the hush money arrangement while Trump was president.

The evidence includes records about former Trump lawyer turned prosecution witness Michael Cohen that are “exculpatory and favorable to the defense,” Trump’s lawyers said. Prosecutors said most of the newly turned over material is “largely irrelevant to the subject matter of this case,” though some records are pertinent.

The hush money case centers on allegations that Trump falsified his company’s records to hide the true nature of payments to Cohen, who paid porn actor Stormy Daniels $130,000 during the 2016 presidential campaign to suppress her claims of an extramarital sexual encounter with Trump years earlier.

Trump pleaded not guilty last year to 34 felony counts of falsifying