Former US President Donald Trump sits in a courtroom at a hearing in his criminal case on charges stemming from hush money paid to a porn star in New York, US, March 25, 2024.
Brendan McDermid | Reuters
“The fact that you don’t have a case right now is really troubling,” Murchan told the former president’s lawyers, referring to their claim that prosecutors in the case withheld evidence.
“You’re literally blaming Manhattan [District Attorney’s] office and the people assigned to this case of prosecutorial misconduct,” Murchan said. “You’re saying that the people assigned to this case are engaging in prosecutorial misconduct, and you don’t have a single citation to support that claim.”
Trump was in the courtroom and listened as Murchan gave a stern assessment of his legal team.
Trump called the case a “witch hunt” and a “fraud” as he entered the Manhattan Supreme Court courtroom.
The hearing came at the same time that a New York appeals court sharply reduced the amount of money Trump must pledge to stop paying a $454 million penalty in a separate civil case.
Trump was set to face a financial payout from New York Attorney General Letitia James, who was poised to begin collecting that massive judgment as early as Monday. The presumptive Republican presidential nominee was unable to put up cash covering the entire judgment to obtain that guarantee.
But during a lunch break in Monday’s hearing, a panel of appeals judges lowered Trump’s bail to $175 million, significantly reducing the amount he will have to post. The panel gave Trump 10 days to post the bond.
As he re-entered Murchan’s courtroom, Trump told reporters, “I have a lot of respect for the appellate division’s decision.” He then railed against the judge who handed down the $454 million verdict, calling it “a disgrace to this country.”
The hush money case had previously been scheduled for trial on Monday, but was postponed until at least mid-April after Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said on March 14 that he did not oppose a 30-day delay to grant time for Trump to review a tranche of recently filed documents.
Trump’s lawyers previously asked Murchan to either dismiss the indictment against Bragg entirely or delay the trial for at least 90 days, arguing that the DA’s office improperly provided them with tens of thousands of pages of documents in the case with little time to prepare.
But Bragg pushed back, telling Murchan that the late arrival of those materials “was solely the result of the defendant’s delay, despite the people’s diligence.”
The judge at Monday’s hearing seemed highly skeptical of Trump’s lawyers.
“You started out by saying that somehow the prosecutor obstructed,” Murchan said. “It just didn’t happen.”
Trump, who is fighting four active criminal cases and a slew of costly civil lawsuits as he tries to oust Democratic President Joe Biden, was outraged at both the fraud and hush money charges ahead of Monday’s hearing.
The penalty in the civil case “should be ZERO, I DID NOTHING WRONG!” Trump wrote on his social media Truth Social.
“The prosecution’s case, which I will consider today, must be dismissed. There is no crime. Our country is CORRUPT!” he added in the same post.
Bragg’s indictment charges Trump with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to hide damaging information from voters before the 2016 presidential election.
The case centers on a $130,000 payment made to porn star Stormy Daniels less than two weeks before the election, which Trump would have won against Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
That payment, made by Trump’s then-lawyer Michael Cohen, was intended to buy Daniels’ silence about an extramarital affair she said she had with Trump years earlier, Bragg’s indictment said.
Cohen has since pleaded guilty to illegal campaign contributions he says he made at Trump’s direction. Cohen has become an outspoken enemy of Trump and is due to testify in the hush money trial.
Trump has denied having sex with Daniels. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges.
This is developing news. Please check back for updates.