The Daily Fuckup

Donald Trump’s lawyers filed a motion in the New York hush-money case on March 7, 2024, asking the court to exclude evidence and adjourn the trial while the Supreme Court considered presidential-immunity arguments in Trump’s separate federal election-interference case. At the time of the filing, the Manhattan trial was scheduled to begin on March 25. In the motion, the defense said the Supreme Court’s review could affect what evidence the state court should allow at trial.

Judge Juan Merchan did not rule on the filing that day. He addressed it later, in a written order dated April 3, 2024. In that decision, Merchan denied the motion as untimely and said Trump had had “myriad opportunities” to raise the immunity argument earlier. The court noted that Trump had already briefed presidential-immunity claims in the federal case and had shown he was aware of the issue in earlier proceedings in the New York matter.

The ruling did not decide whether presidential immunity would bar the evidence Trump wanted excluded. Merchan said the motion came too late under New York’s pretrial motion rules and declined to reach the merits of the immunity claim. He also wrote that the timing of the filing, made 17 days before the scheduled trial date, raised questions about the motion’s purpose.

The filing fit a broader pattern in Trump’s parallel criminal cases, where arguments in one proceeding have often been used to try to affect the schedule or scope of another. Here, though, the key procedural fact is narrower: Trump filed the motion on March 7, and the court later rejected it as untimely rather than as a win on the underlying immunity theory. The motion may have been aimed at buying time, but the record-supported story is simply that the court said it arrived too late.