Donald Trump will face the first ever criminal trial of a former US president on 15 April, a judge has ruled, over hush money payments he made to adult film star Stormy Daniels. Trump faces four criminal cases
The presidential candidate’s lawyers had aimed to delay or dismiss the case.
Mr Trump, 77, faces fraud charges over payments he made to Ms Daniels before the 2016 election.
He has pleaded not guilty to all 34 charges, arguing the claims do not constitute “a crime”.
During his bid to retake the White House, the former president and his legal team have sought to delay as many of his trials as possible.
But Justice Juan Merchan ruled on Monday that there was no reason to delay Mr Trump’s hush money trial any further, despite the defence’s arguments, and ordered the case to begin on 15 April.
After spending much of Monday morning sitting next to his attorneys inside the courtroom, Mr Trump told reporters that the case should be considered “election interference”.
“It’s a disgrace, and we will obviously be appealing,” he said. “But this is a pure case of voter intimidation and election interference, and it shouldn’t be allowed to happen.”
The trial was originally set to begin with jury selection on Monday, but it was delayed after thousands of documents were released last week from the 2018 federal investigation into the payments to Ms Daniels.
Justice Merchan instead held a hearing on Monday centred on whether there had been any wrongdoing in the sudden release last week of more than 100,000 pages of documents related to the federal prosecutors’ case.
Mr Trump’s team had argued the Manhattan district attorney’s office had engaged in misconduct by not doing enough to get the federal prosecutors to hand over the documents in a timely manner. They alleged prosecutors were attempting to “suppress” evidence.
The document release followed a request by Mr Trump’s attorneys in January for records from the federal case. Justice Merchan questioned why the defence had not discussed the long wait with him earlier.
The Manhattan District Attorney’s office had agreed to a delay of 30 days for the documents to be reviewed, but prosecutors said at the hearing that they believed only 300 new documents needed to be considered.
They said that they would be ready to go to trial in mid-April.
