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Papers that delayed Trump's N.Y. trial involve key witness Michael Cohen

Prosecutors told the judge overseeing Donald Trump's New York case there is no meaningful new information about Michael Cohen from a previous investigation.

By Shayna Jacobs, Devlin Barrett | 2024-03-21

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg speaks during a news conference in New York about his indictment of Donald Trump last April. (Angela Weiss/AFP/Getty Images)

NEW YORK -- Manhattan prosecutors on Thursday defended their handling of evidence in Donald Trump's hush money case, saying there was nothing particularly important or problematic in a large batch of documents that was recently given to the former president's lawyers, prompting a delay in the trial of at least 20 days.

The new court filings from District Attorney Alvin Bragg (D) come ahead of a Monday hearing in which Trump's defense team will ask the judge overseeing the case to impose tough penalties on prosecutors for only recently turning over more than 100,000 pages of potential evidence -- specifically, information gathered years earlier by federal agents and prosecutors about Michael Cohen, a former Trump lawyer and fixer who is a key witness in the case.

Bragg told New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan there was nothing in the material that should push the start of the trial past mid-April.

"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 filings said.

The prosecutor called Trump's legal tactics a "grab bag" of erroneous accusations and shoddy legal arguments.

Trump's lawyers have argued that prosecutors should pay a stiff price for supposedly withholding critical evidence from them about Cohen's credibility. Bragg dismissed those claims as nonsense, however, saying any fresh material that discredited Cohen "is merely cumulative" to evidence that was previously given to the defense team.

Trump faces 34 charges of falsifying business records in connection with a hush money payment to an adult film actress during the 2016 presidential election. His indictment nearly a year ago was the first time a former U.S. president had been charged with a crime. Since then, Trump has been charged in three unrelated cases -- in Florida, Washington and Georgia. He has pleaded not guilty in all four cases.

Merchan had originally scheduled jury selection in the trial to begin Monday, but last week delayed the trial until at least mid-April so lawyers for both sides could review the newly available evidence. Merchan has left open the possibility of a further trial delay, saying he would decide that matter after Monday's hearing, where Trump's lawyers will have a chance to respond to Bragg's filing and try to convince the judge that prosecutors failed to follow the rules.

The documents at issue relate to a previous federal investigation into Cohen, who is a central witness in Bragg's case.

The U.S. attorney's office in Manhattan charged Cohen, but not Trump, in 2018 when Trump was president. Cohen eventually pleaded guilty in federal court to a variety of crimes, including campaign finance violations for paying money to Stormy Daniels, the adult film actress who claims a long-ago sexual liaison with Trump. Trump has denied the allegation.

Bragg has accused Trump of purposely concealing the true nature of his reimbursement payments to Cohen, who paid $130,000 to Daniels, allegedly to keep her from speaking publicly about the encounter she says she had with Trump.

This week, Merchan ruled that almost all of the district attorney's proposed evidence in the upcoming trial -- including testimony from Cohen and Daniels -- will be admissible.

The judge denied several motions by Trump to exclude certain evidence. He also denied Bragg's request to play a now-infamous 2005 clip of Trump bragging to an "Access Hollywood" host about his ability to advance on women sexually without resistance. Prosecutors will, however, be permitted to describe the contents of the tape.

Michael Cohen, former attorney and fixer for Donald Trump, testifies before the House Oversight Committee in 2019. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Thursday's court filing shows that there are two main categories of newly available evidence that are the subject of debate between Trump's lawyers and prosecutors: Cohen's phones, and interviews of Cohen conducted years ago by then-special counsel Robert S. Mueller III when he was investigating Russian interference efforts in the 2016 election.

The Manhattan district attorney argues that these issues are not particularly germane to the current case against Trump. Fewer than 270 pages of the more than 100,000 turned over in recent days by federal prosecutors are "relevant to the subject matter of this case" and were not previously disclosed, the district attorney's office wrote in the filing.

The district attorney's office also filed two affidavits trying to explain how Mark Pomerantz, a former prosecutor who worked on the state-level investigation of Trump until early 2022, did not turn over all relevant text messages sought by defense lawyers. The affidavits said Pomerantz missed some of the relevant texts when he looked for them.

Thursday's filings said the newly turned-over material includes a significant amount of bank records related to Cohen that led to the opening of the federal investigation. The filings offer a lot of new information about the types of documents that led to the current dispute -- including how state and federal prosecutors sometimes disagreed over their responsibilities in sharing information with each other, and with Trump's legal team.

State and federal prosecutors disagreed about whether the U.S. attorney's office needed to turn over data that federal prosecutors obtained from Cohen's phones, the filings show. The federal office took the position that they would not turn that data over, because the state prosecutors already "had obtained the phones by consent" from Cohen.

But a different issue also emerged in the course of the discussions, the filing says. For a long stretch of time, federal prosecutors "did not produce" any of the FBI memos describing investigators' interviews with Cohen in connection with Mueller's investigation of possible links between Russia and Trump's 2016 campaign.

In early 2023, the district attorney's court filing said, the U.S. attorney's office possessed only one of Cohen's special counsel interview memos. However, in recent months, that office received five additional Cohen interview memos from the special counsel, and those were turned over to the defense.


This article was downloaded by calibre from https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/03/21/trump-new-york-hush-money-records-delay/


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