A New York judge on Friday postponed the start of the criminal trial of former US President Donald Trump in New York by at least 30 days, moving it from March 25 to the end of April. The precise date has not yet been announced.
The trial, under the jurisdiction of the Manhattan prosecutor’s office, concerns an alleged payment of 130 thousand dollars to the porn film actress Stormy Daniels, which Trump allegedly made in 2016 through his company and his lawyer Michael Cohen to buy the actress’s silence on a sexual relationship with him about ten years earlier.
The decision to postpone the start of the hearings is due to the fact that in recent days around 100 thousand pages of new documents containing information on the case have emerged: Trump’s lawyers had requested a 90-day postponement to be able to study them, while the prosecutor’s office had proposed 30, a request which was then accepted.
The one relating to the illicit payments is one of the four criminal trials in which Trump is involved. In other courts he is accused of trying to subvert the outcome of the 2020 presidential election; of having attempted to change the official results of the presidential elections in the state of Georgia, always with the aim of overturning the overall result; and that he kept some confidential government documents in his villa in Mar-a-Lago, Florida.
If it had started on March 25, the payments case would have been the first trial to reach the hearing stage. Trump and his legal team are in fact trying to postpone the trials as much as possible, to ensure that the hearings and any convictions or acquittals do not interfere with the electoral campaign for the presidential elections on November 5th.
Trump is a candidate in the Republican Party primaries, and so far he has won almost everywhere: he has already obtained enough delegates to secure his nomination as the party’s presidential candidate.