Trump seeks delay of hush money trial while Supreme Court weighs immunity bid

NEW YORK — Donald Trump made a last-ditch bid to postpone his upcoming criminal trial in Manhattan until after the Supreme Court decides his bid for “presidential immunity” in one of his other criminal cases.

Trump has argued for broad immunity in his federal election-subversion case, and in a new court filing, he said those immunity claims should also bar prosecutors in the Manhattan case from using some of the evidence they intend to introduce at trial.

The Manhattan trial, slated to begin March 25, stems from an episode before Trump became president: His alleged agreement to pay hush money in the final weeks of the 2016 campaign to cover up an affair with a porn star. But some of the evidence concerns actions that Trump took after he became president.

The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear oral arguments April 25 on Trump’s claim in the federal election case that he has immunity from criminal charges for nearly any action he took while president. A decision by the high court is expected by the end of June. Many legal scholars believe Trump’s immunity argument is unlikely to prevail, but by litigating the issue, Trump has delayed a potential trial in the election case for at least several months.

Trump also has repeatedly sought to postpone the Manhattan trial, as well as his other criminal cases, as the Republican presidential front-runner seeks a return to the White House.

Trump’s lawyers, Todd Blanche and Susan Necheles, asked the judge overseeing the Manhattan case, Justice Juan Merchan, to delay the trial until after the Supreme Court rules on the immunity issue. Their request came in a filing dated March 7 and made public Monday.

Trump has now invoked presidential immunity to try to derail all four of his criminal cases. The other cases involve his efforts to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia and his alleged hoarding of classified documents after he left the White House. In the classified documents case, special counsel Jack Smith recently called his immunity argument “so wholly without merit that it is difficult to understand it except as part of a strategic effort for delay.”

In their filing in the Manhattan case, Trump’s lawyers raised concerns that prosecutors from Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office have said they intend to introduce evidence from a period when Trump was president, including a 2018 “pressure campaign” by Trump to intimidate his former lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen. Cohen arranged the hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels and is expected to be a key witness in the criminal trial.

Some of the statements by Trump that are expected to be used as evidence were made “in his official capacity as the nation’s Chief Executive,” his lawyers wrote, and so therefore raise the question of presidential immunity. Among those pieces of evidence, they said, are statements that were made on his Twitter, now X, account, which they described as “an official communications channel during his Presidency,” and a form that Trump submitted to the U.S. Office of Government Ethics.

Trump’s lawyers also said that prosecutors have indicated they intend to offer documents and testimony relating to a period in 2017 when Trump was president, but “have not provided sufficiently specific notice of the nature and extent of that evidence to allow President Trump or the Court to distinguish between personal and official acts.”

“Without immunity from criminal prosecution based on official acts, the President’s political opponents will seek to influence and control his or her decisions via de facto extortion or blackmail with the threat, explicit or implicit, of indictment by a future, hostile Administration, for acts that do not warrant any such prosecution,” Blanche and Necheles wrote. They added that such a threat “will hang like a millstone around every future President’s neck.”

A spokesperson for Bragg declined to comment on the request to delay the trial.