The Manhattan district attorney has decided that the 100,000-page document dump that delayed Donald Trump’s hush-money trial by a handful of weeks is, actually, a gigantic nothingburger.
After chewing through more than 31,000 pages of last week’s offload by the Southern District of New York, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg assessed that Trump already has the “overwhelming majority” of them.
“The people now have good reason to believe that this production contains only limited materials relevant to the subject matter of this case and that have not previously been disclosed to defendant,” the filing read, noting that only an estimated 270 documents are new and relevant to the case (and mostly imply guilt or corroborate existing evidence).
“The overwhelming majority of the production is entirely immaterial, duplicative or substantially duplicative of previously disclosed materials.”
That means that the trial will almost certainly move forward in April. Bragg noted that the current pause, which is scheduled to last until April 15, is “a more than reasonable amount of time for defendant to review the information provided.”
Trump is accused of using his former fixer Michael Cohen to sweep an affair with porn actress Stormy Daniels under the rug ahead of the 2016 presidential election. Trump is facing 34 felony charges in this case for allegedly falsifying business records with the intent to further an underlying crime. He has pleaded not guilty on all counts.
Cohen and Daniels are both expected to be star witnesses in the trial, though Trump had previously attempted to keep both of them far away from it on the basis that the two were “liars.” But on Tuesday, a judge nixed that effort, allowing them both to testify.
In a new documentary that intimately follows Daniels’s side of their yearslong legal battle, Daniels explains that she knew that she only had one real option when the $130,000 bribe was offered to her: take it, or risk being killed. In the ensuing years, she would be mercilessly harassed by Trump’s supporters, threatened by strange men insinuating they would kidnap her daughter, and stalked by creeps taking videos of her child.
From Daniels’s perspective, she had become a target after Trump’s political career began: The Republican Party, she says, likes “to make their problems go away.”