For all of the huffing and puffing and loud attempts to push his Manhattan criminal trial back, Donald Trump only got a few weeks of what he wanted.
Manhattan Supreme Court Judge Juan Merchan on Monday set jury selection in Trump’s criminal trial to begin on April 15, pushing it back from its initial March 25 start date.
Merchan rejected a series of extremely strenuous but rather familiar arguments from Trump and his lead attorney, Todd Blanche: prosecutors had been extremely unfair to him. They did so, Trump argued, by failing to secure evidence from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, and by interfering and trying to block supposedly exonerating evidence from making it to Trump’s legal team. The judge expressed a high level of skepticism about all of those arguments.
The drama around this all unfolded over the past several weeks, after prosecutors with the Manhattan DA’s Office disclosed that the Southern District of New York had begun to provide parties to the case with tens of thousands of documents.
Trump had used this to try to impress upon Merchan that the volume of records itself was a cause for delay, and potentially reason to dismiss the case entirely. But Merchan was unmoved.
This is a breaking news story and will be updated.