Donald Trump and his lawyers annoyed the judge overseeing his hush money case involving Stormy Daniels, according to a legal expert who attended a pretrial hearing.
MSNBC legal analyst Lisa Rubin told "Morning Joe" that the judge saw through their attempts to delay the trial and refused to budge on setting a new trial date for April 15, finding that the former president's legal team had been given more than enough time to review evidence recently provided by the Department of Justice to both prosecutors and the defense.
"He was beyond irritated and piqued by the strategy," Rubin said. "He said to Todd Blanche, one of the president's lawyers, 'Look, you are a former prosecutor, how many years did you spend in the Southern District?' He admitted 13 – paralegal for four, prosecutor for nine. He said, 'You know how this works, if documents should have been brought to your attention, at any point in time between last May when you were first given documents by the [district attorney's] office in January, when you issued a subpoena or request to the Southern District, you could have either called the D.A., called the Southern District, brought to anybody's attention this was out there. Why didn't you do that?'"
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"The excuses that Todd Blanche gave were really lacking as far as Judge Merchan found them," Rubin added. "He said, 'We couldn't do it because we were already going through the 11 million pages of discovery we had, we couldn't do it because we were doing this, doing that.' The truth of the matter is Todd Blanche is overextended. He represents former President Trump in three criminal cases. They have lots of high-paid counsel directing the strategy and not enough what I'd call worker bees, people like I used to be, staffing cases by looking through pages upon pages of discovery and understanding what you need for your defense. That's not going to cut the mustard for a delay here."
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