Donald Trump’s upcoming Stormy Daniels trial could be delayed by a month, after federal investigators turned up 100,000 new documents relevant to the case.
“The people do not oppose a brief adjournment of up to 30 days to permit sufficient time for the defendant to review the [U.S. Attorney’s Office] productions,” Manhattan prosecutors wrote to the judge in a court filing on Thursday.
The last-minute surprise throws a wrench into plans to put Trump on trial for much of April and May, given that he was forced to be in the courtroom in the first ever criminal trial against a former American president.
Stormy Daniels Is Going to Screw Trump’s Campaign Schedule
The surprise episode is sure to spark some degree of confusion, given that local prosecutors have appeared poised for trial to begin March 25.
However, the chaos stems in part from the fact that the investigation has a messy origin story. Back in 2017, federal prosecutors at the Southern District of New York investigated the way Trump secretly funneled a $130,000 hush money payment to the porn star Stormy Daniels. But with Trump still in office at the time, prosecutors only pursued criminal charges against the lawyer who coordinated the deal, Michael Cohen.
The Manhattan DA picked up where the feds left off, indicting Trump on 34 felony counts last year for faking business records to hide the deal. As part of that investigation, county prosecutors requested whatever relevant records the feds could share about their probe.
In a court filing on Thursday, the DA’s office revealed that SDNY turned over a whopping 73,000 pages of records since just March 4—and an additional 31,000 pages on Wednesday alone. The office notified the court that it expects the feds to turn over a third batch next week.
It’s a stark development, given that lawyers usually receive evidence well ahead of a criminal trial—and this one of historic proportions is only 11 days away.
By the DA’s own description, the bulk of the material appears to be documents and testimony that prosecutors at the Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s Office presented to the federal grand jury that examined the case—an investigation that included testimony from Trump’s right-hand money man, former Trump Organization chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg.
The DA’s court filing attempted to lay the blame on Trump’s defense lawyers, saying that prosecutors “diligently sought the full grand jury record related to Cohen’s campaign finance convictions from the USAO last year” and received “a subset of the materials.” That evidence was turned over to Trump’s team in June 2023.
But Trump’s lawyers “waited until” January 18 to independently seek the records from the feds and “consented to repeated extensions” every time the feds asked for a little extra time.
“The timing of the USAO’s productions is a result solely of defendant’s delay despite the people’s diligence,” prosecutors wrote.
Prosecutors stressed that they are “nonetheless… prepared to proceed to trial on March 25,” but alerted the judge that they “do not oppose an adjournment in an abundance of caution and to ensure that defendant has sufficient time to review the new materials.”
Trump’s lead lawyer in the case, Todd Blanche, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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