Former U.S. president Donald Trump is in a New York courtroom Monday, looking to delay his criminal trial on charges that he covered up a hush money payment to a porn star just ahead of the 2016 presidential election to hide it from voters when he unexpectedly won a four-year term in the White House.
The case would be the first ever criminal trial of a U.S. president, one of four Trump is facing but perhaps the only one to start before he faces President Joe Biden in the November election in a rematch of their 2020 contest.
The hush money case had been scheduled to start Monday, but Judge Juan Merchan delayed it until at least April 15 as thousands of pages of documents from a previous federal investigation of the hush money case were handed over to prosecutors and Trump’s lawyers. Trump wants the case delayed further, or even dismissed.
Trump has denied wrongdoing, saying on his Truth Social platform, “No crime. Our Country is CORRUPT!”
He is accused of having his one-time political fixer, former lawyer Michael Cohen, make a $130,000 hush money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels just ahead of the 2016 election to keep her from publicly talking about a one-night tryst she claims to have had with Trump a decade earlier at a celebrity golf tournament. Trump has long denied the affair and the criminal allegations.
But prosecutors allege he reimbursed Cohen for the payment and then illegally falsified his business records to claim the payment to Cohen was for legal expenses.
Cohen, who has turned against his one-time boss, is expected to be a key witness against Trump. Cohen pleaded guilty to campaign finance charges in the case and lying to Congress, among other crimes. In all, he spent 13 ½ months in prison and a year and a half in home confinement.
Trump’s three other criminal cases are proceeding slowly. Two of them involve allegations that he illegally plotted to upend his 2020 election loss to Biden and another that he illegally took highly classified documents with him to his Florida oceanside estate when he left office in early 2021. Whether any of the cases are tried before the election is uncertain and Trump, if he wins the November election, could seek to have them dismissed. He has denied all 91 charges he is facing across the four indictments.
Aside from the hush money case court appearance, Trump is facing a day of financial reckoning Monday that may show he is not as flush with cash as he has led the American public to believe.
Trump is facing a deadline to put up $454 million in cash or a bond backed by collateral from his assets so he can appeal a judgment last month that he committed civil fraud for years by inflating the value of his holdings to get better terms on business transactions.
If he can’t come up with the cash or a bond, New York State Attorney General Letitia James appears poised to start the lengthy process of seizing some of Trump’s properties. Her targets could include prominent office skyscrapers in New York City, a large estate and baronial mansion Trump owns outside the city, or cash and stock accounts, even his personal jet he calls Trump Force One.
Trump’s lawyers have said that securing the bond would be a “practical impossibility” because he would need to pledge about $550 million in cash and liquid investments to the bond company to proceed with the appeal. They said 30 bond companies turned down Trump’s request to secure the bond so that he could proceed with his appeal.
In a post on his Truth Social platform last week, Trump claimed he has almost $500 million in cash that he intended to use for his campaign and said James “wants to take it away from him.”
But his attorney, Chris Kise, told CNN that was not the case.
“What he’s talking about is the money reported on his campaign disclosure forms that he’s built up through years of owning and managing successful businesses,” Kise said. “That is the very cash that Letitia James and the Democrats are targeting.”
Throughout a weekslong civil trial late last year, Trump railed against James for bringing the case against him, saying that his properties were valued for more than the figures on financial forms that James claimed were too high.
In any event, Trump argued in the case that the valuations cited in loan applications were basically irrelevant because banks did their own background checks and that in the end, he fully paid back his loans, so no one was financially hurt.
Trump often assailed New York State Supreme Court Judge Arthur Engoron in impromptu news conferences as he walked into court to hear several days of trial testimony and called the final $454 million judgment a “shocking number.”
Monday, on Truth Social, Trump said, “There should be no FINE. Did nothing wrong! Why should I be forced to sell my ‘babies’ because a CORRUPT NEW YORK JUDGE & A.G. SET A FAKE AND RIDICULOUS NUMBER.” He was referring to Engoron and James.