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(Trends Wide) — A federal judge rejected for the second time Monday a request by former President Donald Trump to delay his trial for assault and defamation in New York, which is expected to begin next week.
Trump’s lawyers have called for a postponement, arguing that a “cool period” is needed to get a fair and impartial jury, following media attention on the landmark indictment against the former president on charges of falsifying records. companies to cover up a payment of money to hush up a previous extramarital affair, something he denies.
Jury selection will begin next Tuesday in the lawsuit in which E. Jean Carroll claims that Trump raped her in a New York dressing room in the mid-1990s and then defamed her years later when he denied the facts and said that she was not his “type”, suggesting that she had made up the story to promote a new book.
Judge Lewis Kaplan said it was “pure speculation” to consider that the attention surrounding the impeachment — which was “significantly (though certainly not entirely) brought about by Trump’s own actions” — will affect the ability to select a jury.
Trump’s lawyers suggested there should be a month’s delay because both the impeachment and the trial involve the issue of “sexual misconduct.”
The judge noted that suggesting that the “heart of the litigation” is the same “is simply incorrect.” He also noted that this appeared to be another delay tactic by Trump’s legal team.
“It does not sit well with Mr. Trump to promote pre-trial publicity and then claim that the coverage he encouraged was detrimental to him and should be counted in favor of further delay,” the judge added.
E. Jean Carroll y Donald Trump.
Any bias, Kaplan wrote, will be nullified during jury selection, which will likely include questions about whether they are aware of Trump’s legal problems.
The judge previously ruled that the jury will be anonymous in this case and declined requests to release their identities to Carroll or Trump’s legal team, citing possible security risks stemming from Trump’s own rhetoric.
Kaplan had already turned down another request to delay the trial after Trump’s legal team said they had recently learned that a multimillion-dollar donor to Democratic causes had funded part of Carroll’s litigation. The judge said he will allow Trump’s lawyers to ask Carroll limited questions about those payments in a strictly tailored pretrial statement. He did not rule whether those questions would be allowed at trial.
