A New York judge is set to rule on Donald Trump’s bid to dismiss the first of four indictments he faces on Thursday, a decision that will determine whether the first-ever criminal trial of a former U.S. president can proceed next month.
Trump, the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, has asked Justice Juan Merchan to toss a 34-count indictment charging him with falsifying business records to cover up a hush money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election.
Trump, 77, is expected to attend the 9:30 a.m. EST (1430 GMT) hearing in New York state court in Manhattan. Trump has used his frequent court dates to raise money for his campaign, though the strategy is seeing diminishing returns after he raked in millions around his first appearances last year.
Trump on April 5, 2023, pleaded not guilty to the charges brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, a Democrat. Trump has said the charges should be dismissed, arguing the case was brought for partisan purposes and state laws do not apply to federal elections.
Should Merchan deny Trump’s motions to dismiss, he will determine whether the trial proceeds as scheduled on March 25. That would make it the first of the four federal and state indictments Trump faces to go to trial.
Trump’s political and legal calendars are increasingly overlapping ahead of his expected Nov. 5 rematch with Democratic President Joe Biden, who defeated Trump in 2020.
In a separate court hearing on Thursday, Trump’s lawyers will ask a Georgia judge to disqualify the prosecutor who charged him and several allies with trying to overturn his election loss there in 2020. He says the prosecutor, Fani Willis, had an improper relationship with a lawyer on her team.
Trump also faces federal charges in Washington, D.C., over his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss and in Florida over his handling of government documents. He has pleaded not guilty to all charges.
The Manhattan case centers on former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen’s $130,000 payment to Daniels – whose real name is Stephanie Clifford – to prevent her from publicly claiming ahead of the 2016 election that she had a sexual encounter with Trump a decade earlier while he was married. Trump denies the affair.
