Left: Former President Donald Trump announces he is running for president for the third time at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla., Nov. 15, 2022. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik, File). Right: E. Jean Carroll, center, waits to enter a courtroom in New York for her defamation lawsuit against President Donald Trump, March 4, 2020. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig, File).
Donald Trump lost another attempt to delay trial in author E. Jean Carroll’s lawsuit accusing him of rape, but the former president hasn’t stopped trying to keep the jury at bay.
In a new filing on Friday, Trump’s attorney Joe Tacopina reiterated his longstanding arguments that his client’s historic indictment for allegedly falsifying business records in paying hush money to Stormy Daniels requires a “cooling off” period.
“There are, of course, different factual and legal issues involved in the indictment and this case,” Tacopina conceded. “But the genesis of the criminal case was the accusation that President Trump silenced women who claim to have had extra-marital affairs with him. Issues of sexual misconduct and President Trump’s alleged treatment of women pervade that publicity, which therefore poses a risk of prejudicing the jurors who will decide Ms. Carroll’s allegations.”
On Thursday evening, Senior U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan on Thursday evening swatted down one of Tacopina’s other arguments for a delay — that he needed more time to scrutinize the issue of Carroll’s litigation funding.
The latest ruling preserves the April 25 trial date with little fanfare, but the judge showed little patience for previous attempts to delay the case.
In a scathing ruling from March 2022, Judge Kaplan found that Trump’s “litigation tactics have had a dilatory effect and, indeed, strongly suggest that he is acting out of a strong desire to delay any opportunity [that Carroll] may have to present her case against him.” The judge noted that Carroll was 78 years old at the time of his ruling, adding that the relevance of her age is “obvious.”
Perhaps mindful of this, Tacopina tried to assure Kaplan that he wouldn’t continue this tradition when he joined Trump’s civil defense earlier this year.
“If you say start tomorrow, I’ll be ready,” Tacopina vowed at a hearing on Feb. 7.
As the trial draws nearer, Tacopina has changed his tune: he and co-counsel Alina Habba cited two separate grounds for a month-long trial delay within the past month. In addition to his proposal for a “cooling off” period since the indictment, Tacopina claimed that Trump’s defense needed more time to examine whether Carroll misled them about her litigation funding by Silicon Valley billionaire Reid Hoffman.
Judge Kaplan partially granted that request, ordering Carroll to produce more documents and sit down for another deposition on that subject.
Despite his request to let the news cycle of his indictment recede before his civil rape trial, Trump’s criminal woes may be far from over. In Fulton County, Georgia, a grand jury will reportedly be empaneled again to revisit Trump’s investigation for attempts to overturn the 2020 election in May, the same month the former president chose for the delayed trial date. Department of Justice special counsel Jack Smith also has two criminal investigations into Trump heating up, one over his handling of highly classified records and another into the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Tacopina claims this misses the point.
“This ignores the historic nature of the recent indictment—the first of its kind—and the wall-to-wall coverage that ensued,” the attorney says.
Carroll’s attorney Roberta Kaplan, who isn’t related to the judge, said that the Google Trends paint a different portrait, with searches of Trump quickly tapering off shortly after his indictment.
“In other words, it appears New Yorkers are not as fixated on Trump as he thinks they are,” she quipped.
Trump’s lawyers counter that those trends show what users are searching for, not the information to which they’re exposed.
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