Bloomberg LawMenendez Pleads Not Guilty & Texas Loses Lawsuit
Bloomberg legal reporter David Voreacos discusses New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez pleading not guilty to the latest federal charges. Leon Fresco, a partner at Holland & Knight and the head of the Office of Immigration Litigation during the Obama administration, discusses a federal judge throwing out Texas’s challenge to the Biden administration’s parole policy. June Grasso hosts.
This is Bloomberg Law with June Brusso from Bloomberg Radio.
I'm innocent and I intend to prove my innocence, not just for me, but for the precedent. This case we'll sip for you and future members of the Senate.
That was New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez back in January, and today he once again pleaded not guilty, this time to obstruction of justice charges added to the bribery charges that accused him of accepting gold bars, cash, and a Mercedes Benz in exchange for helping three businessmen. The new allegations are part of what is now an eighteen count indictment. The Democratic Senator's wife, Nadine, and two of the businessmen charged with him, also pleaded not guilty. Joining me is Bloomberg Legal reporter David Voriachis, who was in the courtroom for the police. David explained why Menandez was back in a Manhattan federal courtroom today.
Senator Menendez pleaded not guilty for a fourth time because he was re indicted by prosecutors who expanded the charges against him from earlier indictments. So every time there's a new indictment, he has to appear in court again to plead guilty or not guilty.
And what was the expansion.
It expanded the number of counts in the indictment from four to eighteen, and substantively, what it did was added an obstruction of justice charge against Menendez because prosecutors say that he instructed his lawyers to falsely tell prosecutors that he had repaid a businessman who gave him mercedes the prosecutors say was a bribe. Menendez claimed that the payments that that businessman made on the car, that that was alone.
I mean, you hear all the time about people being charged for lying to the FBI, But this is he lied to his attorneys, which is confidential communication, and his attorneys then unknowingly lied to the prosecutors. It seems like there are too many steps to get to his act. Have you heard of a charge framed in this way before.
It's a very unusual charge and I have not heard of that. It could have a chilling effect on lawyers who communicate with their clients. The indictment says this was his former legal team. And there's also another unusual charge in this case which had previously been brought, that he conspired to act as an agent of Egypt, and that's apparently never been brought against a sitting member of Congress.
Are these new charges being brought basically because one of the businessmen who was charged with Menandez flipped on him.
I think there's an aspect of that. They added the obstruction charge after the guilty plea of Jose Uribe, who admitted in his guilty plea a few days ago that he bribed Senator Menendez and his wife through the gift of this Mercedes Benz and then he made payments on the car. So the new indictment very closely tracks what Jose Uribe admitted to in his guilty plea, and Uribe is now cooperating with prosecutors, and that gives them an insider account of this corruption plot.
That plea is a game changer, I take it.
I would imagine that it is not helpful to Senator Menendez. It's always good for prosecutors to have insiders who can describe how a scheme work. Now, I would say that Uribe pleaded guilty to several charges in addition to bribery, including tax evasion and obstruction of justice himself, so that the defense lawyers could challenge his credibility when he testifies as a prosecution witness against Menendez at trial.
This is the fourth superseding indictment tell us about the initial charges.
The initial charges were three conspiracy to commit bribery charges, and they were all essentially dealing with the same set of facts but with different iterations of the law. And those showed the world that FBI agents seized gold bars at his house hundreds of thousands of dollars of cash, and this Mercedes Benz and it essentially laid out several overlapping bribery plots in which prosecutors allege that Menendez accepted bribes in exchange for doing favors from three New Jersey businessmen who were seeking his help.
Now there is less than two months before trial. Menandez asked to delay the March sixth trial date.
Today he did well. He has previously asked to delay it on a number of grounds, but one of them is that as a member of Congress, he's protected by the speecher debate Clause in the US Constitution, which covers legislative acts. And if he loses that motion to dismiss the indictment on the speech of debate clause grounds he has an automatic right of appeal before trial, which would certainly postpone the trial beyond May sixth. I should say that he was previously indicted in New Jersey in twenty fifteen, and he raised a speecher debate clause motion at the time and the judge denied that. The Senator then appealed it to the US Third Circuit Court of Appeals, where he lost, and then he asked the US Supreme Court to take it up, and the Supreme Court declined to take the case. The whole process took about eighteen months, and then he finally went to trial in twenty seventeen on unrelated corruption charges, and the jury deadlocked on those charges, and the Justice Department ultimately dropped the case.
It's a delay tactic, if nothing else, but explain exactly what his claim is under the speech or debate clause.
He's saying that all the actions that the prosecutors alleged were corrupt were in fact routine legislative matters that are protected as part of his job duties under the speech or debate clause of the Constitution.
His wife also pleaded not guilty. Today are they being represented by the same attorney any different attorneys, and are their defenses the same.
Senator Menendez and his wife, Nadine have separate lawyers, and they have both said that they should have separate trials because their defenses would run against each other's interests, and that they each have a spousal privilege and that if they had to testify against each other that would harm their Fifth Amendment right against self incrimination.
So has the judge decided about that.
The judge has not decided on that aspect yet. There are several motions that are still pending. I should say that Judge Stein has ruled against the defense on a number of motions so far.
You would think that that's something they need to know whether they're going to have separate trials before preparing for the trial that's coming up. I'm surprised the judge hasn't made that decision already, considering it's less than two months to trial, and it surely will make a difference from the defense standpoint whether they're tried together or separately.
Yes, he has a number of motions outstanding, and he has denied other motions to dismiss the case based on improper search warrants, so that the defense just keeps coming, and obviously it's their right to challenge the evidence and the law.
He didn't say anything to the media who were waiting, and.
What he said in a statement was, what this latest charge reveals is that the prosecutors are afraid of the facts, scared to subject their charges to the fair minded scrutiny of a jury, and unconstrained by any sense.
Of justice or fair play. What does he mean they're going to a jury, right?
Yes. I think his general objection is that he believes that these superseding indictments are piling on, that the government just keeps coming with new charges and allegations, and I think he believes that that's unfair. I should say that after the hearing today, several reporters asked the senator if he was going to run for reelection, because his popularity has plummeted since his original indictment in September, he faces a primary election if he were to choose to do so in June. He has not said yet whether he will run for reelection, and today in the hallway outside the courtroom, he said I wouldn't be announcing it in a courtroom.
And just to follow up on that, Ammouth University poll found that sixty three percent of New Jersey residents think he should resign and seventy five percent say he's probably guilty of federal bribery charges he faces. It's a contrast to the first time he was tried and then one reelection, But this case appears to be weightier than the first case against him.
I would say that I covered the first trial every day, and I would say that there's more substantial evidence against him this time. And having eurebe plead guilty and agree to testify against him is going to be a substantial burden for Menendez. And you can't underestimate the shock value of the photographs of the cash and the gold bars that agent seized in a raid on the house where he and his wife live in New Jersey.
And how has his role in the Senate diminished since these charges?
He was a powerful legislative force on foreign affairs. He has since stepped down as chairman of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee because.
Of this indictment, and many of his Democratic colleagues in the Senate, more than twenty of them, have called on him to resign, including his friend and New Jersey colleague, Senator Corey Booker, and The New York Post has reported that Menendez will not run for reelection, according to a source. It sided, So we'll see what happens. Thanks so much, David. That's Bloomberg Legal reporter David Voriakis coming up next on the Bloomberg Lawn Show. A Trump appointee upholds the Biden administration's parole program, which allows up to three hundred and sixty thousand people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela to legally migrate to the US each year. And the Supreme Court has only two days left to block a controversial Texas migrant deportation law. I'm June Grosso and you're listening to Bloomberg.
We are dealing with extraordinary dangers today that have never existed in this country before, with known terrorists coming across our border, and Joe Biden is doing absolutely nothing about it.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott has made it his mission to attack the immigration policies of the Biden administration by passing controversial state laws, bring lawsuits against the federal government, erecting razor wire along the border and shipping migrants to northern democratic run cities, constantly testing the limits on how far local officials can go in defying federal authority over immigration. Since Biden took office, the state has spent more than one point four million dollars litigating dozens of cases related to border security and immigration. But Texas lost its latest legal battle with the Biden administration last Friday. Federal judge Drew Tipton, a Trump appointee who's ruled against the administration in other cases, tossed the state's challenge to the administration's parole program that allows up to three hundred and sixty thousand people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela to legally migrate to the US each year. Joining me is Leon Fresco, a partner in Holland and Knight who headed the Office of Immigration Litigation in the Obama administration. Leon, was it surprising to you that a Trump appointee who's ruled against the Biden administration in other immigration cases ruled in favor of the administration's parole program.
Well, for this particular judge, the Trump appointee, the problem was he actually really did hold a full scale trial on this issue of standing about whether Texas had standing to sue in this case involving the Cuban Haitian Nicaragua and Venezuelan parole. And what this trial found was that there were more Cuban Haitians Nicaragua to Venezuelans coming to the United States before the program than after, which meant that any harm that Texas was suffering was less than it was prior to the program, which meant that it had no standing. And there was basically no way to get around that because there was no evidentiary argument to be able to make to show how Texas would be able to have standing.
It's important that the judge never got to Texas's argument on the merits right, which is part of this program, is constitutional correct.
The judge didn't even get to that argument because of their Article three standing doctrine, which has been decayed for many many years now. You cannot even get to the merits of a constitutional argument unless the person can show that they're harmed by the very law that they're challenging. And here the court really went through a very detailed trial and finding the fact and laid it out very clearly about how many cubansations Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans were coming to Texas prior to that parole program being announced, and how many were coming after the parole program being announced, and then laid out all of the different damages that Texas would have had school damages and drivers' license damages and healthcare damages and detention of people damages, and said that all of those are based on the numbers of people, and if the total numbers are going down, which was a point that Texas couldn't argue, then those numbers are going down, meaning the cost to Texas of that policy was actually giving Texas more money rather than taking away money from Texas, which meant that Texas then had no standing to challenge the law because it was not being harmed by the laws. And then the court had to dismiss the claim.
So the constitutional or the merits argument that Texas was making that the judge never got to was that this program creates a pathway to residency for the accepted migrants and exceeds executive authority on immigration policy. And I'm wondering whether that the merits argument is a pretty good argument.
Well, it is a pretty good argument in the sense that the parole Statue itself says it needs to be a case by case basis is because the whole point of why the parole Statue was amended to read that way was there used to be these group wide paroles during the Vietnam War and with Cambodia and other things, where whole groups of people were parolled into the country. And when the Refugee Act was passed, the idea was, look, if there are legitimate refugees, you have to have an orderly, annual process where the President announces where the United States is going to get refugees from, and the Congress is informed of this and the Congress has a chance to change it in the appropriations process. But you couldn't just announce a mass parole of people into the country. And that is technically what's being done here with the CHNV, the Cuban, Asian, Nicaragua and Venezuela parole program, which is it's a thirty thousand person a month parole program. But that never got to that argument because again the standing argument, which actually is quite a success for the Biden administration to be able to show that this program actually worked in reducing the net numbers total of Cuban nations, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans and during the United States.
Just suppose the merits argument had gone to the Supreme Court. I mean, in the past, the Supreme Court has in recent past has invalidated Biden's executive orders on student loans, right, so the Supreme Court might find that this too goes beyond his authority.
I think there would have been two issues. There would have obviously have been this standing issue, which would have been one, but more importantly, there would have been this issue of dose states have jurisdiction in general to challenge this kind of law, or is this also the kind of law that, now after the Remain in Mexico ruling, is the kind of law not permitted to be challenged by states. So I think the court would have had to make a ruling there whether it's falls within the ambit of laws that has to do ultimately with deportation, which cannot be challenged, or is this because it's entry falls outside of the scope of laws that cannot be challenged. And so those two threshold questions would have been very very important before it then got to the larger final question as to whether this is still a case by case parole, because no Cuban, Haitian, Nicaragun, or Venezuelan is guaranteed entry. They all still have to enter and be approved on their own accord. Or whether this is like DACA or DAPPA, one of those programs where the courts have held that at the end of the day, those are larger, systematic programs and they're not being done on a case by case basis.
So we talked a couple of weeks ago about the rumors that Biden was going to try to take some executive action on immigration in light of the failure of the passage of the bipart as an immigration bill.
Might this ruling.
Encourage him to take executive action or is it just standing and so it's not a big encouragement.
Well, it will be interesting to see from the standpoint of how long it would take to make another claim, whether they wanted to expand this program from the thirty thousand paroles that are currently in there to a larger number, or whether they wanted to expand the program to include some additional countries that are not currently included in the program, such as Ecuador or Columbia, where we're seeing some increased numbers of people coming across the border. Not clear. I don't think this is where the Biden administration is going to go. I don't see them expanding this program. Although the Haitian issue now might become more complicated given the difficulties that are happening in Haiti right now. Maybe perhaps they might increase the parole program for Haiti, But short of that, I don't see it happening for Cuba and Nicaragua Venezuela. I think what you're likely going to see now is whether the Bidend ministry it's comfortable taking actions that they know will be enjoyed by the court solely for the purpose of saying they tried, and here's the proof that you need congressional authority to do things. So, for instance, they could just try to come up with their own asylum band that would be basically taking Title forty two and actually just kicking people out until they're told by a court they can't do that, and then they could say, you see, while I tried, I did everything I could, and I can't do that. They could also try re implementing remain in Mexico, which is what President Trump was in the process of doing. But the problem there is again that would not be implemented in any kind of scale before the election, and so that's not going to actually solve any numerical problems that you're seeing at the border. It may solve some symbolic issues, but it wouldn't solve any numerical problems until much later after the election.
Let's turn now out of this controversial Texas immigration law known as SB four that's set to take effect on Wednesday unless the Supreme Court steps in.
Well, what Texas SB four does, at the end of the day is it allows Texas to do something that no state has ever been able to do before, which is to basically coerce people into returning back into Mexico for fear that if they don't do that, they would be prosecuted for the crime of being unlawfully in the state of Texas unlawfully in the United States. And so what they do is they try to use a carts and six approach in the law, which is to say, look, you won't be prosecuted at all, and you won't have any problem if you simply just returned back into Mexico. But if you choose not to do that and you choose to proceed, we're actually going to prosecute you for a felony, and that felony will be being in Texas lawfully, atter you've already been taken to the border and trying to come back in. And so from that standpoint, that's what the law basically does. And the challenges to that are that states can't do that, they can't take matters into their own hands, and the distinct enforcers of immigration law that that under the Arizona versus United States Supreme Court decision of twenty twelve, is a doctrine that is held only for the federal government to enforce, and states simply can't take matters into their own hands, regardless of what their reasoning would be.
This bill has had a tangled legal history. Let's untangle it. It began when a Texas judge stopped the law, saying that if allowed to proceed, it would open the door to each state passing its own version of immigration laws, which follows Supreme Court precedent.
Right, So then what happened correct and the Fifth Circuit, the United Six Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit very quick weekend order that was then published on a Monday just said we are saying that order of the district judge, meaning the district judge said the Texas law was illegal. We are going to stay that order, meaning there will be no order in place that says that that law is illegal, which means that the law is legal once it's stayed. And what they said was, look, do you want to take an appeal to the Supreme Court. If you do, you want to go ahead and do it. And so that's what the federal government did. They took an appeal to the Supreme Court. And so now there's a new data will go into effects, which is Wednesday, March thirteenth, because the US Supreme Court issued a temporary say of the Fifth Circuit's decision that would have allowed the bill to go into effect March ninth. But unless the Supreme Court allows it, further to be said, the law will go into effect March thirteen.
This law is against their precedent. Shouldn't they step in to confirm what the law is?
So ordinarily to answer that question would be yes. Let me start by saying that. But what's interesting is when the original case challenging the Biden prosecutorial discretion memo came out where there was this judge in Texas that said, the federal government doesn't have any say about prosecutorial discretion. It has to prosecute every single person that it comes across and puts them in deportation proceeding. And that decision was still outside the bounds of anything that had ever happened before the Supreme Court. I don't think really thought about it, just let it go into effect, and it was many months before the Supreme Court ultimately, when it had an oral argument, was incredulous. How is this thing supposed to work where there's a judge in Texas telling Ice who to deport and who not to deport, or else they get put in contensive court. This thing can't work. Of course, we have to let Ice decide who to deport and not to deport. And so by the the time they finally got to the oral argument on the marriage, it was obvious what they had done by letting the law go into effect. And that's saying it was outrageous. But it was too late. Many months had passed, and so you wonder could something like that happen again, where it's just basically the court doesn't have any patience for getting involved in yet another immigration case and simply allows this law to go to effect. Or perhaps the court just wants to see, hey, because Texas actually solve its mortar crisis, if we let this law go into effect, maybe that would be an interesting thing just to see. So we'll just let it happen and we won't say anything about it. So we'll see. We'll see if that actually happened. But one would suspect if the law was nine artificial intelligence robots trying to analyze prior president and trying to analyze this law in Texas, they would of course have to say the case, citing the Arizona versus United States decision of twenty twelve. But stranger things have happened and will just be allowed to go into effect until there's a longer Supreme Court argument about it.
I'm thinking about how if we had nine ais instead of the justices, how things would come out. Moving on, stay with me Leon coming up on the Bloomberg Law Show. I'll continue this conversation with immigration law expert Leon Fresco, and we'll turn to the state of Georgia, where Biden and Trump held dueling rallies over the weekend. I'm June Grosso and you're listening to Bloomberg. Once a Republican stronghold, Georgia is now competitive, and President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump held dueling rallies in the state on Saturday, each warning of dire consequences for the country if the other wins. Attacking each other over immigration, among other things.
Instead of celebrating the contribution of immigrants to our country, to our economy and our communities, Donald Trump calls them verman Trump.
Meanwhile, we hammered Biden on the border and blamed him for the death of twenty two year old Georgia nursing student Lake and Riley, an immigrant from Venezuela who entered the country illegally has been arrested and charged with her murder. He ridiculed Biden for expressing regret over using the term illegal to describe the suspect.
He was an illegal immigrant. He was an illegal migrant, and he shouldn't have been.
In our country, and he never would have been under the Trump policy. I've been talking to immigration law expert Leon Fresco, a partner at Hollanden Knight. Leon tell us about this Georgia bill that would require every police and sheriff's department to help identify undocumented immigrants.
Georgia is trying to pass a bill that is shrinked upon his cities and counties that break state immigration law and basically have a sanctuary city type of policy. And what they're trying to do is they're trying to do what basically Texas did. Texas padelaw like this in the past, where they said it was against the law to be a sanctuary state sanctuary city. So they're requiring jailers to identify in all people if they get apprehended by ice. And so from that standpoint that actually has been litigated in the Fifth Circuits didn't go up to the Supreme Court, but in the Fifth Circuit they said that the state did have the authority to force cities and counties to not be sanctuary cities or sanctuary counties because unlike the way the federal supremacy Clause work, the state government can under its prerogatives, forces cities and counties to not be sanctuary counties. So what Georgia then says is, Okay, we're going to emulate that law that Texas has and we're going to say if you don't call ICE, if you're a police agency, or a local prison or a local jail, if you don't call ICE when you are in custody of a foreign national, then you will be punished by the State of Georgia for not doing this.
One of the Republican state representatives says that clause is needed to enforce existing state law that requires sheriffs to check with ICE. I mean, does that seem like even if it went up to the Supreme Court that that would pass muster right, because.
What's being hadded is the punishment component to it. What they're currently is is a mandate with no punishment, and so this is just adding a punishment component to this, which would cut off local aid to local government and remove elected officials from office who are not complying with this. And so it's not even necessarily prison time, but it's just punishment in terms of funding and in terms of removing people from their offices. I do think if that were to make it to the Supreme Court, it would be upheld under that same logic that the Fifth Circuit upheld the Texas law, which is that states do have the prerogative to do this. Now, the question is, of course, when these individuals call ICE at the moment, are they getting ICE calling them back and apprehending people. And I think they would only be getting that in cases where people have submitted violent crimes. But I don't know necessarily that they're going to get ICE to start picking up a bunch of people who are encountered in traffic stops. And I think this is where there's going to be the frustration in Georgia.
And it's been called the Lake and Riley Act because it's in response to the murder of nursing student Lake and Riley, and a Venezuelan illegal immigrant has been arrested for that. But this law wouldn't have prevented that murder because he was never arrested in Georgia. He was arrested in New York.
Correct, they would have to be a situation where the person was arrested in Georgia and that person would have been had to have been declared to ICE, and then ICE would have actually had to agree to pick up the person. So it perhaps may stop a scenario where there was an officer, perhaps in Fulton County and Atlanta, who wasn't making those calls. Now those individuals will have to make those calls, but that doesn't guarantee that ICE will pick up the person or place them in removal proceedings or place them in detention. And it certainly has nothing to do with it. New York doesn't either arrest the person or doesn't call ICE or doesn't do anything. And so that's the problem is Georgia is trying to solve a problem that didn't actually lead to the murder of Lake and Riley. I understand they may not want that fact pattern to exist in Georgia where somebody who went through the Georgia system does this, but at the end of the day, it would not have prevented this particular murder.
Biden and Trump held dueling rallies in Georgian. Of course, immigration was part of it. There's been a lot of discussion about Biden calling the person arrested for the murder of Lake and Riley an illegal immigrant, and he said he should have said undocumented.
But he is an illegal immigrant, isn't he.
Well, this whole problem with the nomenclature is partly a problem of the immigration code and is partly a problem of the political debate. So in the Immigration Code a person who's not a citizen of the United States. It literally says that in the Immigration Code, in the very first section of the entire code, in the definition section, they say, if you are not a citizen in the United States, the term used to describe you as alien. And then that term alien is used probably seven thousand times is the code, because it's saying when an alien comes, when you detain an alien, blah blah blah. So from that standpoint, you have to first problem of the use of the word alien. Then you have the use of the word well, what do you do if somebody's here without authorization? And interestingly enough, here the code actually doesn't use the word illegal. It just says the person doesn't have authorization, So undocumented as a term that's made up. That's just a politically correct term. But do you want to say that the person is present without authorization that would be the actual legal term, or do you want to say they are an illegal immigrant and illegal alien? This is where all of this gets complicated. But the actual term illegal is not in the code. That term isn't there. What's in the code is this person who's present without authorization or a person who has not admitted or inspected into the United States. So they're very specific ways to describe these individuals. And what probably can't fault Joe Biden for not using the legal term that's in the code, and so this gets complicated. You know, there's been debates back and forth worth about this issue of well, if you don't refer to the conduct as illegal, you're saying that there's nothing wrong with it, and there's some truth to that, And the question is, how do you do it in a way that's not particularly dehumanizing in context other than this. The problem is in this context the man committed a murder, and so some people would argue that the politically correctness is misplaced here. But generally, when describing this phenomenon, how can one basically convey the seriousness of not being for this unauthorized immigration but in a way if it's not dehumanizing to the people who are engaging in it and not otherwise committing any other public states the issue.
So it's all about PC then being PC because illegal is not in the law, but neither is undocumented, correct. So, Leon, I want to get your take on this, because there's been a lot of back and forth about crime by migrants, But is there any connection between migrants and increases in crime?
Well, this is hard to know. These these statistics are very very complicated, and this is this is sort of back when I was in the Department of Justice. I used to cite statistics until I realized that every time we cited statistics to the court, we had to correct them because the statistics were wrong. And so I put in a directive for the lawyers in my department, no more statistics unless the court forces us to give them than we have to. But with the caveat, these statistics are probably wrong. And so because the problem with the crime thing is a crime statistic depends on a lot of factors. You know, somebody has to call the police, a policeman has to actually arrest somebody. That person has to be prosecuted, and so there's no way to know. This argument honestly of people saying whether crime is going up or down because of more immigration really is difficult to know because we don't know what's being reported, what's not being reported, and what baseline we're comparing it to. And so that's the problem. I wish I would be one of these people who could give you something more definitive than that as an ideologue in either direction. But the truth is, if you're really trying to be precise and accurate and responsible to the people listening to your show, you would say, realistically, it's too difficult to know whether more or less crime is being committed by this specific population that's coming through the border right now. Although just generally more people means more crime. I mean that's a fact. Meaning if you let in a million of anybody, there will be a million people who are available to commit crime who would otherwise not have committed crime. So if even one more person committed crime, that would be true. There would be more crime. But the question is is the rate of crime higher with this group than with previous group? And I don't have a good answer to that question.
You had many other good answers, though lyon very good answers. That's Leon Fresco, a partner at Holland and Knight. In other legal news today, Trump is asking for his New York State hush money criminal trial to be delayed, citing his pending immunity appeal, slated to be heard by the US Supreme Court next month. The former president is scheduled to go on trial March twenty fifth on charges he falsified business records to conceal payments he made to porn star Stormy Daniels before the twenty sixteen election in order to bury her claims about an extramarital affair a decade earlier. Today, Trump asked Judge Jan Mrshawan, who's presiding over the hush money case, to delay the trial until after the Supreme Court rules on his bid for immunity from federal election interference charges. The justices are hearing the argument in the case on April twenty fifth, but they may not rule until the end of June, which is the end.
Of the term.
In a ruling made public today, the judge said the deadline for motions was February twenty sixth, and that Trump quote does not explain the reason for the late filing, a mere two and a half weeks before jury selection is set to begin. The judge has given prosecutors until Wednesday to file a response, but he also directed that any lawyer who seeks to file any additional motions must get his permission first. And that's it for this edition of the Bloomberg Law podcast. Remember You can always get the latest legal news by subscribing and listening to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and at bloomberg dot com slash podcast slash Law.
I'm June Grosso and this is Bloomberg
