Judge rips Trump lawyers seeking to delay hush money trial: ‘You don’t have a case right now’

A frustrated New York judge tore into attorneys for Donald Trump in a hearing Monday over their request to delay Trump’s trial on charges of falsifying business records in a scheme to silence women who say they had affairs with him.

“That you don’t have a case right now is really disconcerting,” Judge Juan Merchan told the former president’s lawyers, referring to their claim that the prosecutors in the case suppressed evidence.

“You are literally accusing the Manhattan [District Attorney’s] office and the people assigned to this case of prosecutorial misconduct,” Merchan said. “You are saying the people assigned to this case are taking part in prosecutorial misconduct, and you don’t have a single cite to support that allegation.”

Trump was in the courtroom listening along as Merchan delivered the stern assessment to his legal team.

Trump called the case “a witch hunt” and “a hoax” as he walked into the courtroom in Manhattan Supreme Court.

The hearing came as Trump faces a financial reckoning from New York Attorney General Letitia James, who, as soon as Monday, can start to collect on a $454 million fraud judgment against him in a separate civil case.

The presumptive Republican presidential nominee has been unable to get a bond to stop that penalty from coming due while he appeals.

The hush money case was previously set for trial on Monday but postponed until at least mid-April, after Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said he did not oppose a 30-day delay in order to give Trump time to review a tranche of recently submitted documents.

Trump’s attorneys previously asked Merchan to either dismiss Bragg’s indictment entirely or delay the trial for at least 90 days, arguing that the D.A.’s office improperly gave them tens of thousands of pages of case documents with little time to prepare.

But Bragg pushed back, telling Merchan that the late arrival of those materials “is a result solely of defendant’s delay despite the People’s diligence.”

The judge in Monday’s hearing appeared highly skeptical of Trump’s lawyers.

“You began by saying somehow the D.A. obstructed,” Merchan said. “That is just not what happened.”

Merchan is expected to set a new trial date during or following Monday’s court proceedings.

Trump, who is grappling with four active criminal cases and multiple costly civil cases while he runs to unseat Democratic President Joe Biden, raged against both the fraud case and the hush money case prior to Monday’s hearing.

The penalty in the civil case “should be ZERO, I DID NOTHING WRONG!” Trump wrote on his social media site Truth Social.

“The D.A. Case, that I am going to today, should be dismissed. No crime. Our Country is CORRUPT!” he added in the same post.

Bragg’s indictment accuses Trump of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to hide damaging information from voters before the 2016 presidential election.

The case centers on a $130,000 payment made to porn star Stormy Daniels less than two weeks before that election, which Trump would go on to win against Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

That payment, made by Trump’s then-attorney Michael Cohen, was intended to buy Daniels’ silence about an extramarital affair she says she had with Trump years earlier, Bragg’s indictment said.

Cohen has since pleaded guilty to making an illegal campaign contribution, which he said he made at Trump’s direction. Cohen has become a vocal enemy of Trump’s, and he is set to testify in the hush money trial.

Trump has denied having sex with Daniels. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges.

This is developing news. Please check back for updates.