Former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy said Monday that the judge hearing former President Donald Trump’s criminal case in Manhattan was acting as a “rubber stamp” for Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and would keep the case going despite a “discovery violation.”
Trump is attending a hearing Monday for the criminal case surrounding a $130,000 payout to porn star Stormy Daniels, according to NBC News. McCarthy told “America’s Newsroom” co-host Bill Hemmer that Trump would probably be convicted based on his observations of how Judge Juan Merchan was handling the case. (RELATED: ‘Get Bad Convictions’: Alan Dershowitz Outlines Dems’ Strategy With Trump Indictments)
“It’s a terrible case but it is going to go forward,” McCarthy told Hemmer. “I think there is a high probability Trump could get convicted because what has happened here is Alvin Bragg has taken one transaction, which years ago, if you brought it at all, should have been a misdemeanor falsification of business records in which there are no victims, nobody got harmed by this, the state wasn’t deprived of any tax revenue. He has carved it up into 34 acts he labeled as felonies that could put Trump behind bars for over a… century.”
WATCH:
Andrew McCarthy speaks on the pre-trial hearing in the Stormy Daniels case. pic.twitter.com/tEts3mDMpC
— Harold Hutchison (@HaroldHutchison) March 25, 2024
Trump’s attorneys received over 30,000 pages of documents from the office of the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York on March 13, according to Bragg’s March 14 filing.
“So, it’s a terrible case but the judge has been pretty much a rubber stamp on everything that Bragg has wanted to do, including his theory and the current dispute is over discovery,” McCarthy continued. “The judge is not going to throw this case out over discovery violation. He gave them three extra weeks to prepare and to go through the documents, which Bragg says are either duplicative of stuff Trump already got or else they’re inculpatory, don’t help him.”
Bragg secured a 34-count indictment against Trump in March 2023 over the payout to Daniels. Trump is also facing two federal indictments from special counsel Jack Smith relating to efforts to contest the 2020 election and allegations surrounding classified documents and an indictment handed down by a Fulton County grand jury on Aug. 14, charging Trump and other associates, including former Republican Mayor Rudy Giuliani of New York City and attorneys Jenna Ellis, John Eastman and Sidney Powell over the former president’s efforts to contest the 2020 election results.
“The most important thing I think is that the judge, when he granted the postponement from March 25th to April 15th, told the lawyers and told Trump not to take any other engagements, in particular in the other cases that Trump is facing, and that sounds to me like a judge who wants to keep his trial date,” McCarthy said.
Merchan set a trial date of April 15 after refusing to dismiss the charges.
Editor’s Note: This story has been updated to reflect that Judge Merchan has since set a trial date of April 15 after this story was published.
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