Prosecutors say they are open to delaying the start of Donald Trump’s hush-money criminal trial in New York by a month, in an abundance of caution to give the former president’s lawyers time to review evidence they only recently obtained from an earlier federal investigation into the case.

The Manhattan district attorney’s office said in a court filing Thursday that it does not oppose a 30-day delay in the trial but will contest the defense’s request for a longer delay. Judge Juan Manuel Merchan did not immediately rule.

Jury selection is scheduled for March 25. The hush money case is one of four criminal charges against Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.

Trump’s legal team said it has received tens of thousands of pages of evidence from the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan over the past two weeks, including records about former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen that they say are exculpatory and beneficial to the defense. Prosecutors argue that the newly transferred material is largely irrelevant to the subject matter of this case.

Trump’s lawyers want at least a 90-day reprieve, but they have also asked Merchan to dismiss the case entirely, saying the last-minute revelations amounted to prosecutorial misconduct and violated federal criminal justice rules. sharing evidence. That process, called discovery, is routine in criminal cases and is intended to help ensure a fair trial.

Prosecutors allege Trump’s lawyers caused the problem by waiting until Jan. 18 to subpoena the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the entire file, just nine weeks before the scheduled start of jury selection. Dist. Atty. Alvin Bragg’s office said it requested the full file last year, but the U.S. attorney’s office turned over only some of the documents. Trump’s lawyers received that same material last June and had ample time to seek additional evidence from the federal investigation, the district attorney’s office said.

Brief trial delays due to evidentiary issues are not unusual, but any delay in a case involving Trump would be significant with trial dates in his other criminal cases up in the air and Election Day less than eight months away.

The defense has also sought to delay the trial until after the Supreme Court rules on Trump’s presidential immunity claims, which his lawyers say could apply to some of the allegations and evidence in the hush money case. The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on April 25.

Since March 4, Trump’s lawyers have filed more than

100,000 pages of U.S. attorney’s office documents, including a batch of 31,000 pages on Wednesday, according to a court filing. More material is expected to be transferred in the coming days. The hush money case centers on allegations that Trump falsified his company’s records to conceal the true nature of payments to Cohen, who paid porn actor Stormy Daniels $130,000 late in the 2016 presidential campaign to back up her claims of an extramarital sexual encounter with Trump years ago. rather to suppress. The New York case centers on allegations that Trump falsified his company’s internal records to conceal the true nature of payments to his former lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen, who helped Trump bury negative stories during his 2016 presidential campaign. Cohen paid porn actor Stormy Daniels $130,000, among others, to suppress her claims about an extramarital sexual encounter with Trump years earlier.

Trump pleaded not guilty last year to 34 felony counts of falsifying company records. He has denied having a sexual encounter with Daniels, and his lawyers argue that the payments to Cohen were legitimate legal fees and not part of a cover-up.

Trump has repeatedly tried to delay the start of his criminal trials.

We want a delay,” Trump told reporters during a hearing in the New York case on February 15. ‘It is clear that I am running for elections. How can you run for office if you’re sitting in a Manhattan courthouse all day?

The flood of evidence that prompted Trump’s lawyers to request a delay concerns a federal investigation into the hush money issue that sent Cohen to prison.

After working for Trump for a decade, Cohen broke with his boss in 2018 and quickly pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations related to the hush money payments, making false statements on a bank loan application and evading taxes in connection with its investments in the taxi industry. and lying to Congress. The contributions were in the form of payouts to women who said they had had extramarital sexual encounters with Trump, who denied them.

Cohen served about a year in prison before being released to home confinement due to the COVID-19 pandemic. He became an outspoken enemy of Trump and is poised to become a key prosecution witness in the hush money trial. Trump and his lawyers have now portrayed Cohen as unreliable.

Although federal prosecutors said in their case against Cohen that the hush money payments were made to benefit Trump and occurred with his knowledge, they stopped short when they accused Trump of directly committing a crime. The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which provides legal advice and guidance to executive agencies, has maintained that a sitting president cannot be indicted. The U.S. attorney in Manhattan did not resume the investigation when Trump left the White House. Sisak, Peltz and Offenhartz write for the Associated Press.