Former President Donald Trump’s hush-money trial in New York was set to begin Monday, but instead, a judge granted Trump a hearing to take place that day to review what Trump has claimed were nefarious discovery violations on the part of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.
An eleventh-hour transfer of documents from the Department of Justice to Trump’s attorneys earlier this month prompted rounds of finger-pointing between lawyers for the former president and Bragg’s team over who is responsible for the delayed discovery, leading Judge Juan Merchan to schedule the hearing on the day the trial would have started.
Bragg, as part of his prosecutorial obligations, should have obtained the material from the DOJ and provided it to Trump long ago, Trump’s attorneys argued.
The attorneys accused Bragg of attempting to hide evidence about Michael Cohen from Trump and asked the judge to dismiss the case because of it. Bragg, however, blamed the DOJ and accused Trump of employing trial delay tactics.
Below is a look at what transpired and why it has derailed the case.
Beginning on March 5, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York unloaded more than 100,000 pages of discovery onto Bragg and Trump in response to requests Trump made in January for the documents.
The late-arriving dumps of material marked a stunning development in a case with a trial set to begin in three weeks. Bragg had seemingly provided Trump with all the requisite discovery from the U.S. attorney’s office back in June 2023, but it turns out that Bragg’s production was incomplete.
The documents, at least a fraction of which Bragg and Trump both say are new, relate to the U.S. attorney’s prosecution of Cohen in 2018. Cohen worked as a lawyer for Trump during his 2016 presidential campaign and later pleaded guilty to several federal charges, including campaign finance violations.
Cohen admitted as part of his plea deal to paying porn star Stormy Daniels to silence her ahead of the election after Daniels warned she would come forward to the public about an affair she claimed she had with Trump years earlier.
Bragg has alleged Trump participated in that scheme by falsifying business records in the months after the election to conceal the payment.
Trump was a critical part of the U.S. attorney’s investigation, but the federal government never brought charges against Trump. The DOJ, at the time, cited a Nixon-era policy that advised against prosecuting sitting presidents.
Now facing state prosecution, Trump’s attorneys signaled they were heavily interested in the investigative documents in the U.S. attorney’s possession because some of them could be favorable to Trump, given that the federal prosecutors had closed their case without filing charges. This led to their receipt of the new documents in March.
Trump’s attorneys said some of the material included “reports relating to statements by Cohen that are exculpatory and favorable to the defense.”
“It is easy to see the wrongful motives that drove [Bragg] to attempt to make sure that these reports never saw the light of day, and to try to prevent President Trump from obtaining them,” Trump’s attorneys wrote in a court filing. “Those motives are deeply unethical and require sanctions.”
They called on Merchan to hold a hearing about the matter, dismiss Bragg’s indictment, preclude any testimony from Cohen, and delay a trial for at least 90 days to give Trump time to review the new discovery.
Merchan responded by delaying the trial, “if one is necessary,” until mid-April and agreeing to a hearing, which will happen Monday.
“There are significant questions of fact which this Court must resolve before it may rule on Defendant’s motion [to dismiss the case],” Merchan wrote.
Prosecutors from Bragg’s office fired back at Trump in a court filing that Trump was “alleging a grab-bag of meritless discovery arguments in the latest of a long series of attempts to evade responsibility.”
The prosecutors said Trump’s claim that Bragg had intentionally withheld exculpatory evidence, also known as Brady material, was a “red herring” and the small amount of material that was both relevant and new was actually “inculpatory,” that is, damning for Trump.
The prosecutors argued that they did their due diligence in seeking Brady material from the U.S. attorney’s office last year, effectively blaming the office for failing to hand over all of the responsive material at the time of their initial requests.
A spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office declined to comment.
The prosecutors also claimed Trump was wildly overreacting to a late production of discovery by seeking the drastic remedy of tossing the case out, and they accused the former president of attempting to stall the case.
“The belated nature of the recent [U.S. attorney’s office] productions is entirely a result of defendant’s own inexplicable and strategic delay in identifying perceived deficiencies in [Bragg’s] disclosures and pursuing independent means to obtain that evidence,” prosecutors wrote.
The development of the late discovery has caused theories to swirl about who is at fault for the trial schedule veering off course, why the DOJ held on to material relevant to Trump’s case for so long, and why Bragg failed to secure requisite discovery in a timely manner.
Cohen is viewed as perhaps the most important witness in the case.
Trump has leaned into Cohen being a convicted fraud, someone who, as Trump’s attorneys have noted, has reason to “curry favor” with prosecutors and “fabricate” stories about Trump. Moreover, a judge recently observed that Cohen may have committed perjury when he testified in Trump’s civil fraud case, which could undercut Cohen’s credibility as a witness. Bragg, meanwhile, is expected to turn to Cohen as his star witness and a firsthand participant in Trump’s alleged scheme.
One former U.S. attorney, John Fishwick, an Obama appointee, said Bragg was to blame for the late discovery production but did not go as far as to suspect the failure was intentional.
“There’s been some finger-pointing between Bragg’s office towards the Southern District of New York, but at the end of the day, the team that’s prosecuting the case, it’s their responsibility to have gotten on top of these documents well before now,” Fishwick said.
Fishwick said Bragg should have erred “on the side of giving too many documents versus too few.”
“I understand Bragg’s office is saying, ‘Oh, we’re upset that we got sandbagged here by the SDNY.’ That’s really irrelevant,” Fishwick said. “You need to be in front of this long ago so that this doesn’t happen.”
Mike Davis, the founder of the Article III Project and a supporter of Trump, called the case the “weakest” of Trump’s four criminal cases and observed that both the “Biden Justice Department and Alvin Bragg are just now producing evidence, including potentially exculpatory evidence, for Trump.”
“That appears as a Brady violation, which is a very serious constitutional violation that in fair courtrooms would get the case dismissed,” Davis said, adding that it also warranted “severe sanctions.”
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Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University, noted that material related to Cohen was “particularly important for the trial given [Cohen’s] prominent role given by Bragg in the case.”
“The SDNY has ample evidence against Cohen who was just denounced by another federal judge as a serial perjurer. The failure of the SDNY to prosecute Cohen after he admitted that he lied on the stand is baffling,” Turley said. “In any other case, members of the bar would be outraged by the delay in potentially exculpatory material. However, once again, the name of the defendant appears to negate long-standing principles and practices.”