The trial in the case against former US President Donald Trump over money transfers in New York has been postponed until mid-April, Judge Juan Mercan decided, NBC reported.
Mercan said the trial, originally scheduled for March 25, would be delayed by 30 days.
He also scheduled a hearing on the original trial date to discuss a request made by Trump's lawyers to produce documents in the case.
Mercan said that when he rules on that request, he will set a new trial date "if necessary," meaning the trial could be delayed beyond the middle of next month.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg previously said he would support delaying the trial for at least 30 days, until the end of April. Trump's legal team asked that it be delayed for 90 days.
Bragg said Trump's request to delay the trial was a result of the U.S. attorney in Manhattan providing more than 100,000 pages of disclosures that Bragg said were "largely irrelevant to the subject matter of the case." On March 15, the US Attorney's Office provided an additional 15,000 pages of disclosures, which Bragg's office said were also "likely unrelated to the subject matter of this case."
The documents relate to Michael Cohen's 2018 guilty plea to numerous criminal charges, including making secret payments to women who claimed to have had ties to Trump, lying to Congress about Trump's business dealings with Russia and failing to declare of income in the amount of millions of dollars.
Merchan ordered Trump's lawyers and Bragg's office to provide him with a "detailed chronology of events surrounding the requests for final production of documents" that served as "the basis" of Bragg's March 14 letter, in which he said, that his office does not oppose the 30-day delay in the trial.
Bragg's office filed the lawsuit against Trump, accusing the former president of falsifying business documents related to Cohen's $130,000 payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels near the end of the 2016 presidential campaign.
34 charges have been brought against Trump for falsifying business documents related to the payments of "hush money" to Daniels./BGNES