“The overwhelming majority of the production is entirely immaterial, duplicative or substantially duplicative of previously disclosed materials, or cumulative of evidence concerning [former Trump lawyer] Michael Cohen’s unrelated federal convictions that defendant has been on notice about for months,” Bragg’s filing said.
While Trump’s lawyers have argued that prosecutors should pay a stiff price for supposedly withholding critical evidence from them about Cohen’s credibility, Bragg dismissed those claims as nonsense, saying any material that discredited Cohen “is merely cumulative” to evidence that was previously given to the defense team.
Bragg also wrote that there is no need to further delay Trump’s trial, in which he faces 34 charges of falsifying business records in connection with a hush money payment to an adult film actress during the 2016 presidential election. His indictment nearly a year ago was the first time a former U.S. president had been charged with a crime. Since then, Trump has been charged in three unrelated cases — in Florida, Washington and Georgia.
Trump has pleaded not guilty in all four cases.
New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan had originally scheduled jury selection in the hush money trial to begin Monday, but last week delayed the trial until at least mid-April so lawyers for both sides could review the newly available evidence.
Merchan has scheduled a hearing on the documents for Monday, and Trump’s lawyers will have a chance to respond to Bragg’s filing then. The judge has left open the possibility of a further trial delay, saying he would decide that matter after the hearing.
The documents at issue relate to a previous federal investigation into Cohen, who is a central witness in Bragg’s case.
The U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan charged Cohen, but not Trump, in 2018, when Trump was president. During that case, it was revealed in court that Cohen was acting on Trump’s behalf and at his direction when paying hush money to Stormy Daniels, the adult film actress, who claims a long-ago sexual liaison with Trump — which Trump denies.
Cohen pleaded guilty in federal court to crimes including campaign finance fraud related to the hush money payment.
This week, Merchan ruled that almost all of the district attorney’s proposed evidence in the upcoming trial — including testimony from Cohen and Daniels — will be admissible.
The judge denied several motions by Trump to exclude certain evidence. He also denied Bragg’s request to play a now-infamous 2005 clip of Trump bragging to an Access Hollywood host about his ability to advance on women sexually without resistance. Prosecutors will, however, be permitted to describe the contents of the tape.
Bragg has accused Trump of purposely concealing the true nature of his reimbursement payments to Cohen, who paid $130,000 to Daniels, allegedly to keep her from speaking publicly about the encounter she says she had with Trump.
Thursday’s court filing shows that there are two main categories of newly available evidence that are the subject of debate between Trump’s lawyers and prosecutors: Cohen’s phones, and interviews of Cohen conducted years ago by then-special counsel Robert S. Mueller III when he was investigating Russian interference efforts in the 2016 election.
The Manhattan district attorney argues that these issues are not particularly germane to the current case against Trump. Fewer than 270 pages of the more than 100,000 turned over in recent days by federal prosecutors are “relevant to the subject matter of this case” and were not previously disclosed, the district attorney’s office wrote in the filing.
He said the material includes a significant amount of bank records related to Cohen that led to the opening of the federal investigation.
In addition, the filing says, state and federal prosecutors disagreed about whether the U.S. attorney’s office needed to turn over data that federal prosecutors obtained from Cohen’s phones. The federal office took the position that they would not turn that data over, because the state prosecutors already “had obtained the phones by consent” from Cohen.
But a different issue also emerged in the course of the discussions, the filing says. Federal prosecutors “did not produce” any of the FBI memos describing Cohen’s interviews in connection with Mueller’s investigation of possible links between Russia and Trump’s 2016 campaign.
In early 2023, the district attorney’s court filing said, the U.S. attorney’s office possessed only one of Cohen’s special counsel interview memos. However, in recent months, that office received five additional Cohen interview memos from the special counsel, and those were turned over to the defense.