Manhattan District Attorney asks the judge to delay Trump’s trial in the ‘Stormy Daniels case’ for a month

In an unexpected turn of events, Donald Trump, the Republican candidate in the November presidential election, could receive a legal respite, as his lawyers have aggressively tried to play the delay card in most of the many proceedings against the former president. The former president’s New York trial on 34 criminal charges was set to begin in the Stormy Daniels case (a bribe payment to a porn actress to buy her silence about their extramarital affair) on March 25. But on Thursday, less than two weeks before the trial was scheduled to start, prosecutors proposed a delay of up to 30 days. That was a surprising development in what is expected to be the first criminal trial against a former president in U.S. history, barring further delays.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office charged Trump with 34 felonies for covering up a sex scandal during and after the 2016 presidential campaign; the bribe was intended to prevent a scandal so as not to harm his candidacy. Bragg explained that the delay would give the defense sufficient time to review a new batch of records, which the D.A. recently received from federal prosecutors after seeking them for a year. Federal prosecutors investigated the hush money payments at the start of the case years ago.

The new evidence consists of tens of thousands of pages, which is why Trump, who is leading in several presidential preference polls, and his defense team requested that the trial be delayed for 90 days. It is not the first time that his attorneys have opted for dilatory tactics in order to gain time and delay Trump’s trials as much as possible; New York was to be the first of the four criminal cases. But with the prosecutors’ agreement and petition to delay the start of the trial by a month, it seems more than likely that they will succeed this time. Interestingly, until today, the Manhattan case was the only one of the four criminal cases that had not been delayed. Trump, who secured the Republican presidential nomination for the third time this week, faces four criminal trials and several civil lawsuits.

In a document filed on Thursday, the Manhattan District Attorney’s office said that they are prepared to begin the trial on March 25 as scheduled, but they “do not oppose an adjournment in an abundance of caution and to ensure that defendant has sufficient time to review the new materials.”

The New York trial derived from another criminal indictment against Trump in Washington for conspiring to overturn the results of the 2020 elections. That case was also scheduled for this month, but it has been delayed while the defendant appeals to the Supreme Court.

The delay in the Stormy Daniels case would be a great boost for the former president, whose main strategy for dealing with his multiple court cases is to delay the process for as long as possible. If elected to a second term in November, the criminal cases against him would be stalled until he leaves office, although the Manhattan trial (like the one in Georgia) is a state case, unlike those in Washington, D.C., and Florida, which are federal ones.

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