A New York judge on Thursday said former President Donald Trump will face trial next month on charges he falsified business records to conceal hush-money payments before the 2016 election, forcing him to spend weeks before a Manhattan jury during the heat of his third presidential run.
Judge Juan Manuel Merchan said he decided to stick to the March 25 start date after speaking with the judge in Mr. Trump’s now-delayed federal election interference case in Washington.
The decision to forge ahead with the first of four criminal trials facing Mr. Trump, the front-runner for the GOP nomination, headlined a pivotal day for Mr. Trump in courtrooms New York and Georgia.
Lawyers for Mr. Trump and his 18 co-defendants in a Georgia election subversion case tried to get prosecutors tossed, peppering a defiant Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis with questions about lavish trips and meals she enjoyed with special prosecutor Nathan Wade as part of their romantic relationship.
She said she often reimbursed Mr. Wade with cash for their shared expenses.
“Whatever he told me it was, I gave him the money back,” Ms. Willis testified, hoping to separate any personal benefit from taxpayer money that Mr. Wade received. She said their romance ended last August.
Jury selection in New York will begin prior to Republican voters in 17 states and Puerto Rico having their say in the GOP primaries. Mr. Trump is coasting toward the nomination and is working to stave off a lingering challenge from former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley.
The biggest political risk for Mr. Trump may be that, if found guilty, he would face a rematch with President Biden as a convicted felon.
Mr. Trump watched from the Manhattan courtroom Thursday as his attorneys made a last-ditch attempt to dismiss an indictment that says the ex-president concealed hush-money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels, Playboy model Karen McDougal and a doorman who claimed Mr. Trump had a child out of wedlock.
“It is completely election interference to say ’you are going to sit in this courtroom in Manhattan,’” Trump defense lawyer Todd Blanche said Thursday.
Judge Merchan, however, seemed pleased that he had resisted the defense’s pleas from months ago to postpone the trial.
“I’m glad I took that position because here we are — the D.C. case did not go forward.”
The hush-money trial is expected to last six weeks, the judge said. As the defendant, Mr. Trump is required to attend, and he predicted he’ll campaign after at night after court ends each day.
“They want to keep me nice and busy so I can’t be campaigning so hard,” Mr. Trump said outside the courtroom. “Maybe we won’t have to campaign so hard because the other side is incompetent. The other side has done a horrible job running this country. I’m going to have to sit here for months on a trial. I think it’s ridiculous, it’s unfair.”
Prosecutors allege the payments were funneled through Mr. Trump’s attorney-turned-fixer, Michael Cohen, in a bid to conceal bad press ahead of the 2016 election. The most salacious aspect of the case involves Ms. Daniels who says she had a sexual encounter with Mr. Trump in 2016.
The former president denies the affair.
Former Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. declined to push the case but current Democratic DA Alvin Bragg took it up and presented evidence to a grand jury.
Mr. Trump faces 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in the indictment. He pleaded not guilty and says the allegations are part of a Democratic witch hunt to hurt his presidential campaign.
Persons convicted of falsifying business records rarely receive serious jail time, if any.
The allegations in the indictment stem from actions in 2016 and have been aired out in the media for years, so some experts say the case will not have the same impact on voters as pending trials that pivot on Mr. Trump’s push to overturn the 2020 election results and attempts to keep government records at his Mar-a-Lago estate.
“Of all of the legal tangles that have enveloped Mr. Trump, this is the most esoteric,” said Ross Baker, a political science professor at Rutgers University. “This is likely to be seen as a tempest in a teacup compared to [allegations of] purloined classified documents and fomenting insurrection.”
Much of Mr. Trump’s legal drama Thursday unfolded more than 800 miles south of New York, in Atlanta, where Judge Scott McAfee presided over a two-day hearing on whether to disqualify Ms. Willis from the case that alleges Mr. Trump and others violated racketeering laws by conspiring to overturn Mr. Biden’s 2020 win in Georgia.
One Trump co-defendant, Michael Roman, filed a motion alleging Ms. Willis benefited from the prosecution because she hired Mr. Wade, a lawyer, to work on the case and then took luxury trips with him in an apparent romantic relationship.
A college friend of Ms. Willis, Robin Yeartie, testified the pair began dating after a municipal court conference in late 2019, contradicting an affidavit from Mr. Wade that says they began seeing each other in 2022.
Ms. Willis and Mr. Wade stuck by their timeline during their high-stakes turns on the witness stand.
“It’s not like when you’re in grade school and you send a little letter and it says, ’Will you be my girlfriend?’ and you check it. I don’t know the day we started seeing each other but it was early ’22,” Ms. Willis said.
Mr. Wade said they broke up in the middle of 2023.
Before Ms. Willis took the stand, Mr. Wade insisted that Ms. Willis derived no financial benefit from their relationship while he billed the public for his investigative work. His contract with the county has paid him and his law firm more than $600,000.
He said she paid him back in cash for her share of trips to places like Belize and California because she was a public figure and tried to limit transactions tied to her name.
“She’s going to insist that she carries her own weight. It actually was a point of contention between the two of us,” he said. “Our relationship wasn’t a secret. It was just private.”
The hearing will continue Friday, and Judge McAfee will decide whether to disqualify Ms. Willis.
• This story is based in part on wire service reports.
• Tom Howell Jr. can be reached at thowell@washingtontimes.com.
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