Donald Trump's latest apparent attempt to delay his New York hush-money trial over the federal government's evidence drop earlier this month did not go as his attorneys may have hoped. In fact, it may have backfired on the former president instead, legal experts suggested.
During Monday's pre-trial hearing in the case, which revolves around hush money payments he made to an adult film actress ahead of the 2016 election, New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan tore into Trump's defense team for crying foul over the around 200,000 pages of evidence federal prosecutors turned over this month.
“The defendant has been given a reasonable amount of time to prepare,” Merchan declared, setting a start date of April 15 for the trial.
The judge declined to sanction attorneys for either party, and with Monday's proceedings, what legal experts have dubbed Trump's last-minute attempt to stall the proceedings went up in flames. It also provided another example of a "judge running out of patience with Trump's disruptive legal strategy," The Daily Beast reports.
The court's "evident exasperation and scorn" for Trump's lawyers throughout the hearing is what most struck former New York prosecutor Bennett Gershman.
"Judge Merchan showed yesterday that he is going to administer the trial firmly and fairly and is not going to permit Trump and his lawyers to distract, mislead, or play games," Gershman, a Pace University law professor, told Salon, adding that the judge was "openly impatient and intolerant at the way Trump’s legal team was litigating this case."
For more than an hour, Merchan probed the former president's attorneys over what he eventually described as a "misleading" tactic that threw the trial schedule off-kilter — leading to a 30-day delay — after the feds produced the evidence in response to a January request from Trump's team.
The judge seemed perturbed that the defense didn't raise these concerns during what was supposed to be the last pre-trial hearing on Feb. 15. He zeroed in on defense lawyer Todd Blanche, admonishing him for not seeking records for his client earlier instead of waiting for the Manhattan district attorney's office to produce them and then complaining about it at the eleventh hour.
Merchan also pointed out that Blanche worked as a federal prosecutor for the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York, the office at the center of the document debacle, for more than a decade.
“You were there for 13 years. So you know that the defense has the same ability as the prosecution to obtain these documents. So when you received the people's first production, you could have very easily done exactly as you did in January, but for whatever reason you waited until two months before trial,” Merchan said.
He went on to fire back against Blanche's attempt to shift blame back to the district attorney.
In another instance, Merchan, according to The Daily Beast, later appeared "almost enraged" when he discussed Trump's effort to fashion the document dump into a scandal and how it implicated the court in the process. Trump, he noted, in claiming the district attorney withheld evidence from them was painting him as "complicit" in an "unethical strategy."
The judge outlined the district attorney's responsibilities and shredded Blanche when he failed to cite cases that indicated otherwise, the outlet reported.
“If you don’t have a case right now, that is really disconcerting, because the allegation the defense makes in all of your papers about the people's misconduct is incredibly serious. Unbelievably serious,” Merchan said. “You are literally accusing the Manhattan DA's office... of engaging in prosecutorial misconduct—and of trying to make me complicit in it. And you don't have a single cite to support that position, that the people by not obtaining the documentation at the US Attorney's Office had somehow committed some sort of fraud on the court?”
Judge Merchan's handling of the Trump team demonstrated he is in "complete control" of the courtroom, Gershman explained, and showed that he will "not allow Trump's lawyers to make speeches, engage in theatrics, or misrepresent the facts" and will ensure that "Trump and his lawyers do not try to misuse the courtroom for political ends."
If, in the future, Trump's legal team attempts to employ "legal maneuvering that is not based in the fact and the law," as they did in suggesting the district attorney's committed prosecutorial misconduct, "they could find themselves in deeper trouble," Temidayo Aganga-Williams, a white-collar partner at Selendy Gay PLLC, told Salon.
The judge, if forced to respond to those challenges, he added, has the power to impose sanctions and limits on the admissibility of evidence during trial, which "only hurts" the client.
CNN legal analyst and Brookings senior fellow Norm Eisen, who was present in the courtroom, noted the contrast between Merchan's usual "even-tempered" nature and "extremely sharp" tone with Trump's legal team Monday, highlighting a moment when Merchan "lifted his eyes and glared" at Blanche while making his points.
"He's angry, and that matters not only for today but because this is the man who is going to sit as the judge in this trial and — if Trump is convicted — who will sentence him. So Trump's lawyers burned a lot of capital in this futile effort to delay the trial further," Eisen told CNN.
From my spot in the court today in NY, I saw Judge Merchan’s frustration first hand
— Norm Eisen (norm.eisen on Threads) (@NormEisen) March 25, 2024
Trump’s lawyers burned a lot of capital w the Judge in the failed attempt to get more delay
I discussed on @CNN w @wolfblitzer @JessicaARoth1 @GloriaBorger & Ankush Khardori pic.twitter.com/167pbKpepB
Monday's proceedings made clear that Merchan has "no patience" for Trump's legal team and will "keep close reins on them in the upcoming trial," Laurie Levenson, a Loyola Law School professor who specializes in white collar crime, told Salon.
"I don't think they have much credibility with him and that will hurt them when the court makes many discretionary calls during the trial," she said.
Gershman expects the upcoming trial to "go smoothly" with outbursts from the Trump team "negligible" and the judge controlling the trial "effectively" to allow for the jury to reach a verdict "sometime in May or early June."
Should Trump or his attorneys "break the rules" during trial, Merchan doesn't seem like he will hesitate to "call them out," Levenson added, noting that he "clearly will not allow a 'free-for-all.'"
And should Trump try to apply his usual approach to litigation — basically creating "a circus" in the courtroom — to his hush-money trial, he's on track "to be convicted," Aganga-Williams said, emphasizing Trump's "staggering" losses in his other recent criminal and civil trials.
"If his lawyers have learned anything from this interaction with Judge Merchan, it's that they should conduct themselves, I think, in a more thoughtful, reserved way that is really based in creating a persuasive argument to the jury, and not a persuasive argument to the media," he said.
