Former President Donald Trump boards his airplane after speaking at a campaign event in Manchester, Latest Hampshire, April 27, 2023.
Jabin Botsford | The Washington Post | Getty Images
Donald Trump will go on trial starting March 25 for the Latest York criminal case through which he’s accused of falsifying business records related to a hush money payoff to porn star Stormy Daniels, a judge said Tuesday.
That trial is ready to start in the course of the presidential primary season and lower than eight months before the 2024 election for the White House.
Trump, who has pleaded not guilty, is currently searching for the Republican nomination for that race.
He’s the primary American president, former or otherwise, to face criminal charges.
Manhattan Supreme Court Judge Juan Merchan announced the trial schedule as Trump appeared in court via a video hook-up for a hearing within the case Tuesday.
Merchan warned Trump that he might be sanctioned if he violates an order that restricts his ability to make public evidence and other material related to the criminal case.
The judge earlier this month issued that protective order after the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office raised what it called substantial concerns that Trump would “inappropriately” use the fabric or post it on social media.
Merchan told prosecutors to file their pre-trial motions by Aug. 29, and gave Trump’s lawyers until Oct. 10 to file their responses. Merchan said he would rule on the motions on Jan. 4, at a hearing where Trump would should appear in person.Â
A spokesman for Trump’s campaign and an attorney for Trump within the case didn’t immediately reply to requests for comment from CNBC.
Trump was indicted in late March by a grand jury, which accused him of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.
Those records mischaracterized the character of payments connected to reimbursements Trump and his company, the Trump Organization, made to his former attorney Michael Cohen after Cohen paid Daniels $130,000 shortly before the 2016 presidential election.
Daniels, in exchange for that cash, agreed to maintain quiet about her allegation of getting had sex with Trump once a decade earlier, months after his wife Melania had given birth to Barron Trump. Donald Trump denies having sex with the adult film star.
The indictment says those payments to Daniels and one by the publisher of The National Enquirer to Playboy model Karen McDougal were a part of an effort to maintain their claims of sexual trysts with Trump from affecting his possibilities against Democrat Hillary Clinton within the 2016 election.
Trump faces three other pending criminal investigations, all of which carry the danger of charges being filed against him.
In Georgia, the Fulton Country district attorney is weighing whether to hunt an indictment of Trump and others for his or her efforts to get state officials to effectively overturn President Joe Biden’s victory within the 2020 election in Georgia.
The U.S. Department of Justice individually is investigating Trump for the try and reverse his loss to Biden within the national Electoral College results that 12 months, and his conduct as much as and the day of the Jan. 6, 2021, riot by his supporters on the U.S. Capitol. The DOJ is also probing Trump’s refusal to give up a whole bunch of presidency records, a lot of them classified, after he left the White House.
On May 9, a civil jury in a Manhattan federal court trial found Trump answerable for sexually abusing the author E. Jean Carroll during an encounter at a Latest York department store within the mid-Nineties, and for defaming her when she went public in 2019 together with her claim that Trump had raped her.
– Additional reporting by CNBC’s Kevin Breuninger
