Donald Trump arrived at NYC court Thursday, where a judge will likely finalize a trial date in the criminal case charging the real estate mogul with concealing payoffs to alleged lovers to hide potential sex scandals from voters in the 2016 presidential election.
Trump, 77, is slated to take a seat at the defense table in a packed courtroom on the 15th floor of the criminal courthouse in lower Manhattan at 9:30 a.m. for a hearing expected to last two to three hours.
Judge Juan Manuel Merchan is expected to rule on the 45th president’s long-shot bid to throw out felony charges of fudging business records — and decide if Manhattan prosecutors followed rules for divulging evidence — before setting a schedule for jurors to hear the case.
If the judge confirms the current schedule calling for jury selection to start on March 25 — smack in the middle of Republican primary season — the Manhattan case will be the first of Trump’s four criminal cases to head to trial.
Trump is charged with 34 felonies stemming from his alleged covering up of $310,000 in “hush money” payments made before the 2016 election — including funds that stopped porn star Stormy Daniels and ex-Playboy model Karen McDougal from going public with stories that Trump had secret trysts with them.
The businessman and reality-TV-star-turned politician is accused of hatching a plan with his personal lawyer Michael Cohen to have honchos at the tabloid mag National Enquirer pay Daniels $130,000 and McDougal $150,000 for “exclusive” rights to publish their stories — but then bury them.
Trump also signed off on another $30,000 payoff — as part of what is known as a “catch-and-kill” scheme — to silence a former Trump Tower doorman who was trying to sell a story claiming that Trump had fathered a secret child out of wedlock, the court papers allege.
Trump’s crimes unfolded when the then-president lied in internal Trump Organization company records throughout 2017 that reimbursement payments to Cohen for the hush money payouts were actually made for “legal services,” according to an indictment.
To convict Trump on the felony raps, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office will need to prove that Trump falsified the records to conceal another crime.
State prosecutors have said the hush-money payments amount to campaign donations and exceed contribution limits. Cohen pleaded guilty in a separate federal case to a campaign finance crime for the same payoffs and was sentenced in 2018 to serve three years in prison.
Bragg’s office has argued in court papers that the alleged hush money payments interfered with the 2016 election by blocking the public’s right to hear “damaging” claims that Trump cheated on his wife Melania.
Daniels had planned to come forward with her story soon after the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape surfaced in which Trump was caught on a hot mic bragging about groping and trying to have sex with several other women who were not his wife.
“You can do anything. … Grab ’em by the p—y,” Trump says in the 2005 clip.
Trump, on the other hand, has claimed that the case against him — the first-ever criminal charges faced by an ex-US president — is “election interference” and “political persecution” because it was unsealed in the months leading up to the start of the 2024 campaign.
Trump has pleaded not guilty to charges that carry a potential prison sentence of four years each. But it’s unclear whether Bragg’s office would seek to jail Trump if he’s convicted.
Thursday’s appearance will be Trump’s first time at the drab Manhattan Supreme Court building on Centre Street — four blocks away from the Brooklyn Bridge — since his arraignment last April.
But he’s been a mainstay by the Manhattan courts since October, when he attended opening statements at a separate courthouse down the block at a fraud trial that could cost him at least $370 million if a judge sides with the New York Attorney General’s Office.
Trump also attended most of a January civil trial in a third courthouse — this one handling federal cases — that ended with a Manhattan jury ordering him to pay a whopping $83.3 million in damages for defaming E. Jean Carroll, the advice columnist whom a prior jury found that Trump sexually assaulted inside a department store fitting room.
Trump was allowed to come and go in the civil cases as he pleased. But he’ll be required to attend every day of the Manhattan criminal trial in person.
