Joe Tacopina doesn't have a conflict in representing Trump for Manhattan charges: judge

The trial judge presiding over former President Donald Trump's criminal case in Manhattan will not rule that attorney Joe Tacopina has a conflict of interest in representing him, reported the New York Law Journal on Monday.

Supreme Court Judge Juan Merchan has declined to hold a conflict hearing on Tacopina, which was requested previously in a complaint filed by the attorney for adult film star Stormy Daniels.

Legal experts have for months raised red flags about Tacopina's involvement in the case, because Daniels previously approached him as a potential counsel years before, creating the potential that he may have some inside information about her he could use to defend Trump at trial. However, Daniels never actually retained him as an attorney. Despite this, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has separately asked for information from Tacopina to clarify the matter.

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The Manhattan criminal case, the first of four prosecutions against the former president in various jurisdictions, alleges that Trump committed fraud by misrepresenting payments that were supposedly to buy off Daniels' silence about an affair the two of them had in 2006, to prevent it from being made public during the 2016 presidential election.

Bragg has charged the fraud counts as felonies, which means he is alleging the fraud was committed in order to cover up an underlying financial crime.

In addition to these charges, Trump is facing two sets of indictments, federally and in Georgia, for the plot to overturn the 2020 presidential election, and another federal indictment under the Espionage Act for his stash of highly classified national defense information kept at his Mar-a-Lago resort. He has denied any criminal wrongdoing in all of these