He is charged with falsifying business records to cover up a potential sex scandal.

NEW YORK — Donald Trump will face his first criminal trial on April 15, the judge overseeing the former president’s hush money case ruled Monday after having allowed a several-week delay so Trump’s lawyers could review last-minute documents relevant to the case.

The Manhattan trial, over a payment Trump authorized in the final weeks of the 2016 election to silence porn star Stormy Daniels’ claims of a sexual encounter with him, had been set to start March 25. But after federal prosecutors handed over hundreds of thousands of pages of documents related to the case in recent weeks, Justice Juan Merchan agreed earlier this month to postpone the start of proceedings until at least mid-April.

At a hearing on Monday, Merchan refused to allow further delays, saying that despite Trump’s attorneys’ claims, the district attorney’s office “is not at fault for the late production of documents from the U.S. attorney’s office.”

In court filings, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg had consented to a 30-day delay, while Trump’s lawyers pushed for at least 90 days and sought to have the case dismissed entirely.

Bragg is a local prosecutor, and his federal counterparts in Manhattan have material that is potentially relevant to Bragg’s case because they investigated the hush money payment in 2018 and ultimately charged Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer. Cohen made the payment to the porn star, Stormy Daniels, and was subsequently reimbursed by Trump. Cohen pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations in connection with the payment, and he is expected to be a key witness for the prosecution in Trump’s upcoming trial.

Bragg, who charged Trump nearly a year ago, alleges that Trump repeatedly falsified business records connected to the hush money payment, disguising it in the Trump Organization’s books as legal expenses. Trump is charged with 34 felony counts of violating a state law on corporate recordkeeping fraud.

The document dispute arose after federal prosecutors turned over several tranches of documents in recent weeks in response to a January request from Trump’s attorneys. Trump’s attorneys said they filed the January request after discovering that the district attorney’s office hadn’t received certain material from the U.S. attorney’s office when it initially turned over documents to Bragg’s office last summer, and blamed Bragg’s office for what they described as an inadequate effort to seek all of the relevant material.

For more than an hour on Monday, Merchan grilled Trump attorney Todd Blanche about why he sought the documents so late in the process, what portion of the documents are relevant to the case and why he deserves more time to review them.

Blanche argued that the district attorney’s office improperly failed to seek additional information from federal prosecutors last year and that Trump’s defense team waited until January to seek it themselves because federal requirements obligated them to try to obtain it through other channels before requesting it from the U.S. attorney’s office. He said he couldn’t say with certainty how many pages of documents were relevant to the case because he hadn’t reviewed all of them yet, but estimated that it was likely “thousands,” disputing an assistant district attorney’s contention it was no more than 300.

At several points, the judge grew irritated with Blanche, telling him: “What I’m seeing is what, to me, has become a pattern, where I read certain information, I see certain information, and then I hear your interpretation of that, and it’s really different from my interpretation.”
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“It’s odd that we’re even here,” Merchan added.

The Manhattan case is just one of four criminal cases Trump faces as he seeks to return to the White House. It is the only one of the four with a clear trial date — and it could be the only one that goes to trial before the November election.

His federal criminal case in Florida on charges of mishandling classified documents has a trial set for May 20, but U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon has indicated that date will change.

The Supreme Court has agreed to hear oral arguments next month on Trump’s claims of presidential immunity in his federal criminal case in D.C. on charges he sought to subvert the results of the 2020 election, so that case won’t have a trial rescheduled until after the Supreme Court rules.

Trump’s criminal prosecution in Atlanta on state charges he attempted to overturn the 2020 election results doesn’t have a trial date set.