Trump will face the first criminal trial against a former US president starting April 15

Former President Donald Trump appeared this Monday before the New York criminal court for a pre-trial hearing for the

Stormy Daniels case

(the payment of dark money to a porn actress to buy her silence for an extramarital affair).

Only procedural issues were resolved at the hearing: whether the start of the trial, initially scheduled for this Monday but delayed due to the addition of new evidence to the summary, could be delayed even more, up to the 90 days requested by his lawyers, which in this and The rest of the proceedings against Trump – three other criminal cases and two civil cases – have based their strategy precisely on buying time.

The Prosecutor's Office saw no reason to delay it beyond mid-April, considering that the additional deadline has given the defense sufficient time to study the new evidence.

And so it has been: the first criminal trial against a former US president will begin on April 15.

The efforts of Trump's legal team to delay all trials as much as possible until after the November 5 elections are based on the hope of re-election, which would effectively stop criminal cases against him.

The other three criminal proceedings are also bogged down in delays of various kinds, so the Manhattan case may be the only one to be resolved before the elections.

The Manhattan district attorney's office, led by Democrat Alvin Bragg, had asked the judge not to accept any further delays in the trial over Trump's payment of hush money to adult film actress Stormy Daniels during the 2016 election campaign. , to avoid a scandal that would have tarnished his good name as a candidate for the White House.

Ten days ago, Judge Juan Merchan postponed the trial, at least until mid-April, after the appearance of new documents, which Bragg considers largely irrelevant or duplicates.

But the delay of the federal prosecutors in delivering this evidence gave a new argument to the defense to request another 90 days of delay and even the filing of the case due to alleged malpractice on the part of the prosecutor, or the neglect, at least, in the times.

Trump returned this Monday to the place where approximately a year ago the same judge read him the 34 criminal charges for falsifying business records to cover up the dark money deal with the porn star (the disbursement was recorded as a legal expense in the accounts of the company).

The payment was made by Michael Cohen, who was then his lawyer and his confidant and later became a prosecution witness against him.

In fact, the new documents recently delivered by federal prosecutors come from previous investigations into Cohen, who in 2018 was tried and sentenced to three years in prison for what was once considered a crime of illicit campaign financing, the aforementioned payment of 130,000 dollars (about 120,000 euros) to the actress.

According to one of the prosecutors, “99%” of the documents were irrelevant, many of them bank records of Cohen, who rigged all kinds of dirty affairs for Trump when he served as his squire and is now expected to be the star witness of the process.

All of this is happening while Trump's other trials — including federal prosecutions for election interference and alleged mishandling of classified documents — are on hold and he is trying to run out the clock until November with frantic litigation and appeals.

The Supreme Court is due to consider his sweeping claim for presidential immunity for acts committed in office next month, and a ruling is not expected until late June.

The decision could have major implications for the criminal cases Trump faces as he seeks a second term in the White House.

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