Trump's Delay Tactics in Manhattan Continue

We were fortunate with last night’s weather. All of the Vances, including the baby chicks, are fine. They spent their first night in the big coop with all of the grown-ups and were waiting for me this morning, having followed the big chickens down the ladder. They were peeping for breakfast when I got there.

Last night’s weather detour leaves us with an excess of legal ground to cover today, so, I’m going to break it up to avoid overloading you in one post.

This edition of the newsletter covers Trump’s last-ditch efforts to avoid going to trial in Manhattan on April 15th. Later, we’ll pick up with Jack Smith’s response to Judge Cannon’s “I’m not going to rule on Trump’s Presidential Records Act Motion; I’ll just jump straight to the jury instructions” order from last week.

Trump is predictably trying some of the last-minute motions we expected him to file to derail the trial. And they are all predictably meritless.

Motion to Recuse the Judge

This is Trump’s second attempt at a motion to recuse the Judge and it’s for essentially the same reasons as the first one. (It’s in the form of a letter because the Judge now requires both parties to file a request for permission to file a motion before they actually file one due to Trump’s early disregard for deadlines. The practice is to send the letter and ask the court to adopt it as the motion if the Judge is going to grant permission.) The Judge denied the first motion, and this one should meet a similar fate.

The Judge’s daughter has a job. In that job, she works on behalf of Democratic campaigns. She has done work for notable Democrats, including Kamala Harris. To Trump supporters, including his lawyers, this translates as some variant of: the Judge’s daughter makes money because he’s keeping the case alive.

Of course, Judge Merchan did what good judges do when a motion alleging they have a conflict is filed. When the first motion was filed, he sought an ethics opinion on whether he had a conflict of interest that required him to step aside. The ethics panel concluded he did not because the outcome of the case wouldn’t impact his daughter’s business. The best Trump’s lawyers can argue is that the Judge’s daughter does business with some of his opponents. You can read their unsuccessful effort at linking the prosecution of Trump to her business prospects in the paragraph above. It’s pretty weak sauce, akin to arguing that if a judge’s kid does business with Airbus, the judge can’t sit on a case involving Boeing. That’s not the standard being used here—it’s whether decisions the Judge makes will impact his daughter’s financial prospects. Here, whether Trump wins or loses, the daughter continues to do her work on behalf of her Democratic clients. The fact that she’s in politics, so to speak, isn’t the defining standard.

As we discussed earlier this week, defendants don’t get to keep filing motion after motion on the same grounds after an initial one is dismissed, in the absence of new evidence. They must wait until after trial and if there is a conviction, they can appeal the trial judge’s decision then.

That’s the tack the DA’s office takes here. They responded, writing that Trump "has identified no changed circumstances" that justify revisiting Merchan's earlier order denying Trump's motion seeking his recusal. "There is simply nothing new here that would alter this Court's prior conclusion that nothing about this proceeding will directly benefit Authentic [the daughter’s business] or this Court's family member, let alone this Court."

The DA cites the Ethics Advisory Committee’s opinion, "A relative's independent political activities do not provide a reasonable basis to question the judge's impartiality."

Trump’s lawyers also claim the Judge has made public statements about the case, but the DA points out they failed to acknowledge he actually declined to comment on any specifics of case, while saying a great deal of work and “intense preparation” has to take place ahead of trial. The DA concludes that, "This daisy chain of innuendos is a far cry from evidence that this Court has 'a direct, personal, substantial or pecuniary interest in reaching a particular conclusion,’” quoting controlling New York caselaw on conflicts of interest.

It wouldn’t be surprising if the Judge declined to permit Trump to even file his motion, given the absence of a rationale for it.

Motion to Delay the Trial Because of Pre-Trial Publicity

The DA also opposes Trump’s motion to delay the case because of pre-trial publicity, arguing that Trump shouldn’t be rewarded with more delay when he’s been the one ginning up the media attention on the case, that he’s now complaining about. That’s a solid argument. The DA also makes the point that jurors don’t have to be ignorant of the facts of a case. What they must be is willing to set aside anything they’ve heard or seen outside of the courtroom. They must commit to deciding the case on the basis of the evidence they hear at trial and the law as the judge defines it for them, and if they are seated on the jury, they must swear an oath to that effect. That’s why there is an extensive voir dire jury selection process, in which each side is able to question jurors and determine if there is anyone they should exclude from service.

Impartial juries have been selected for Trump in other cases, including E. Jean Carroll’s recent defamation cases across town in federal court. There is no reason to believe that won’t happen here. Moreover, there’s no reason, the DA points out, to believe that delaying the trial would reduce the attention paid to it. Again, Trump comes up short. This is a desperate effort to delay, not a motion made because it has legal merit.

One Motion Down: The Judge Denies Trump’s Motion to Exclude Evidence, But More Importantly, To Delay The Trial, Based on Presidential Immunity

This afternoon, Judge Merchan denied Trump’s motion to exclude evidence, like his “presidential tweets” about the case, because, in Trump’s convoluted universe, anything he tweeted or said while in office is cloaked in presidential immunity. Trump always says the quiet part out loud, and in this case, he discussed everything the payments Michael Cohen made to the character of the witnesses and their veracity.

Trump’s real goal with this motion was to entangle the Manhattan case with the immunity appeal being argued in the Supreme Court later this month, hoping that the Manhattan case would be derailed and that he could delay it to death.

The Judge declined to play ball. He ruled against Trump, but not on the merits of any immunity-related issues. Instead, he found that Trump’s lawyers missed the deadline.

Finding that there was no good excuse for the failure to file the motion in time, the Judge ruled against Trump. It will be interesting to see if the Judge uses these same grounds again, as Trump continues to throw the proverbial spaghetti up against the wall here at the eleventh hour (apologies to Stephanie Ruhle), hoping something, anything, will stick.

We’re in this together,

Joyce