Former president Donald Trump, talks to members of the media while visiting a bodega, Tuesday, April 16, 2024. (AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura)
In a move giving Donald Trump a better idea of what prosecutors may bring up should he take the stand in his criminal hush-money and election interference trial, prosecutors on Wednesday rattled off a long list of the former president’s uncharged bad acts for the judge overseeing the case in New York.
The filing is what is known as a Sandoval notice, and per the three-page document from Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office, it discloses “all misconduct and criminal acts of the defendant not charged in the indictment which the People [of New York] intend to use at trial to impeach the credibility of the defendant pursuant to CPL § 245.20(3)(a).”
Though the notice is just a scant three pages, it features a table of 13 facts about Trump that prosecutors say they plan to bring up to impeach him should he testify or when he is cross-examined. But until New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan weighs in, there is no guarantee that every item will be admissible. An attorney for Trump did not immediately respond to request for comment Wednesday.
The cases Bragg and his team of prosecutors cite stem from a limited number of Trump’s more recent legal defeats, namely, veteran columnist E. Jean Carroll defamation trial as well as New York Attorney General Letitia James‘ civil fraud prosecution. Bragg’s team also cites the ruling from Trump v. Clinton, noting how in that case, the court sanctioned had him and ordered he pay $937,989 in fees for filing a “frivolous, bad faith lawsuit.”
Bragg’s team cited from that ruling:
Here, we are confronted with a lawsuit that should never have been filed, which was completely frivolous, both factually and legally, and which was brought in bad faith for an improper purpose. Mr. Trump is a prolific and sophisticated litigant who is repeatedly using the courts to seek revenge on political adversaries. He is the mastermind of strategic abuse of the judicial process, and he cannot be seen as a litigant blindly following the advice of a lawyer. He knew full well the impact of his actions.
Also undermining his credibility as he faces the 34 criminal charges in New York for falsifying records, prosecutors argue, was the recent civil court’s ruling that he repeatedly falsified business records under the Trump Organization banner and engaged in conspiracies to issue false statements. When he testified in that case, he did so untruthfully by claiming his public commentary about a judge’s law clerk were instead about a witness, Bragg’s team noted, but then he proceeded to make attacks on the judge’s law clerk despite two orders not to do so.
Prosecutors want to reserve the right to bring up how Trump defamed Carroll not once, but twice, and did so with actual malice. The judgment in that case of more than $83.3 million should be up for discussion and the same goes for the more than $350 million judgment against him in the civil fraud matter.
The full list is available here.
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