Trump’s hush money criminal trial postponed 30 days

FILE: Donald Trump speaking at the Iowa Republican Party’s 2015 Lincoln Dinner at the Iowa Events Center in Des Moines, Iowa. (Photo by Gage Skidmore/Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0)

HOUSTON, United States – A judge in the state of New York agreed Friday to delay Donald Trump’s hush money criminal trial for another month, according to media outlets.

The former president’s attorneys had requested a 90-day delay, but the judge ruled for a 30-day adjournment to allow Trump’s legal team to sort through a last-minute evidence dump that included more than 100,000 pages of documents from a previous federal investigation into the matter.

The criminal case centers around allegations that Trump falsified his company’s records to pay off porn star Stormy Daniels during the 2016 presidential election to suppress claims that she had a sexual encounter with Trump years earlier.

The USD130,000 hush money payment was allegedly filtered through the former president’s business to hide the true nature of the payment and given to his then-attorney Michael Cohen who paid Daniels.

The last-minute documents were related to Cohen’s 2018 guilty plea to several criminal charges, including making secret payments to women who claimed they had affairs with Trump and lying to Congress about the former president’s business dealings.

Trump faces 34 felony counts of falsifying business records related to the hush money payments to Daniels and has pleaded not guilty to the charges.

They are part of 91 state and federal criminal charges the former president faces, including trying to overturn the 2020 election results in the state of Georgia, his alleged involvement in the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riots and illegally taking classified documents from the White House.

The hush money trial was set to start March 25 but with the postponement, it would start no earlier than April 15, barring any further delays. (Anadolu)