Trump’s Lawyers Press Judge to Toss Stormy Daniels Hush-Money Case

Donald Trump's attorneys are asking a New York Supreme Court judge to toss the state's criminal case charging the former president with using hush-money payments to keep an adult actress quiet during his 2016 White House campaign.

The 57-page omnibus motion attacks Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg's underlying case, one of four criminal indictments that the GOP's 2024 front-runner must navigate over the next year while seeking the presidency.

"After a five-year meandering, halting, and roving investigation that entailed inexplicable and unconstitutional delay, the District Attorney’s Office filed a discombobulated package of politically motivated charges marred by legal defects, procedural failures, discovery violations, and a stubborn refusal to provide meaningful particulars regarding its theory of the case," Trump's attorneys, led by Todd Blanche, argue in their motion which is dated Sept. 29 and made public Thursday.

Bragg charged Trump with repeatedly falsifying business records in connection with hush-money payments to pornographic film actress Stormy Daniels.

Before the 2016 election, Trump's then-attorney and fixer Michael Cohen acknowledged engineering a system of transmitting a $130,000 payment to Daniels' then-attorney Keith Davidson. Cohen obtained the money through a bank loan before funneling through the shell company Essential Consultants LLC, an act for which federal prosecutors charged him with campaign finance violations.

Cohen later played guilty to that and other crimes, and before his sentencing, prosecutors said Trump Organization officials paid him $420,000, grossing up for interest on his loan and tacking on $60,000 for "tech services" and legal fees.

Manhattan prosecutors said that Trump falsified business records by paying Cohen back in $35,000 monthly installments wrongly labeled as legal fees.

Trump's attorneys attack Cohen's credibility in their hopes to dismiss the case.

"The pretrial presumption in favor of the credibility of the prosecution’s witnesses has never been stretched as thinly as it is here," the former president's lawyers added. "Nevertheless, and even while granting DANY the inferences to which it is entitled, this case must be dismissed."

Alvin Bragg, a Democrat, obtained a grand jury indictment against Trump in March, charging the former president with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in the first degree. Trump has pleaded not guilty, and a trial is currently scheduled for March 25. That date could move based on other conflicts on Trump's legal calendar.