A federal judge on Monday denied former President Donald Trump’s bid for a four-week delay in the civil rape and defamation trial against him.
Trump lawyer Joe Tacopina asked U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan in a letter last week to postpone the trial in the lawsuit brought by writer E. Jean Carroll, scheduled to start April 25, until the end of May. Carroll’s lawsuit alleges that Trump raped her at a Manhattan department store in the mid-1990s, which Trump has repeatedly denied.
Tacopina argued that his client should be allowed a “cooling off” period following his recent historic indictment by a Manhattan grand jury in a case involving hush money payments made during his 2016 presidential campaign, which drew a surge of media coverage.
In a 10-page opinion denying Trump’s request on Monday, Kaplan wrote that “there is no justification for an adjournment.”
“This case is entirely unrelated to the state prosecution,” Kaplan wrote. “The suggestion that the recent media coverage of the New York indictment — coverage significantly (though certainly not entirely) invited or provoked by Mr. Trump’s own actions — would preclude selection of a fair and impartial jury on April 25 is pure speculation. So too is his suggestion that a month’s delay of the start of this trial would ‘cool off’ anything, even if any ‘cooling off’ were necessary.”
Kaplan also rejected the notion that delaying the trial would decrease the possibility of “negative publicity” before the trial. In the request to delay the trial, Tacopina argued that the influx of media coverage of Trump’s indictment and arraignment could taint the jury pool.
Kaplan wrote, “It is quite important to remember [also] that postponements in circumstances such as this are not necessarily unmixed blessings from the standpoint of a defendant who is hoping for the dissipation of what he regards, or says he regards, as negative publicity. Events happen during postponements. Sometimes they can make matters worse.”
Kaplan also noted that “at least some portion” of recent media coverage of Trump’s indictment “was of his own doing” and that the alleged sexual conduct at the heart of the Manhattan district attorney’s case, which involves adult film star Stormy Daniels’ allegations that she had an affair with Trump — accusations that Trump denies — and was paid to keep quiet, is “dramatically different” from Carroll’s allegations of rape by the former president.
Kaplan concluded that there is a “possibility that this latest eve-of-trial request for a postponement is a delay tactic” by Trump and would disrupt the jury panel summoned more than three weeks ago as well as court personnel involved in making preparations, including security arrangements, for the trial. He noted that Carroll is 79 years old and her case has been pending for three years, and that both parties are entitled to a fair trial.
Tacopina and Carroll’s lawyers declined NBC News’ request for comment. A Trump spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Kaplan’s ruling comes after a Washington, D.C., appeals court ruled that it did not have enough facts to decide whether Trump was acting as president when he accused the former Elle magazine columnist in June 2019 of lying about the alleged encounter.
It sent the case back to the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan, which last September asked whether under local law Trump made his comments in his role as president or in his personal capacity as Carroll argued.
Lisa Rubin and Reuters contributed.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
