Tacopina conceded that Trump typically always receives extensive media coverage, but claimed that Google searches revealed a noticeably increased amount of coverage of Manhattan Attorney Alvin Bragg’s arrests earlier this month. These accusations include assertions that Trump fabricated financial documents to conceal payments of hush money to a porn star in order to conceal an affair.
There is a particularly high risk that civil juries may conflate these charges with Carroll’s claims of “sexual misconduct,” Tacopina stated.
Kaplan was unfazed by the indictment’s mayhem and continued to work on Trump’s civil case. He most recently supported a move for civil trials to provide juror anonymity, noting potential threats to their safety from Trump’s comments, particularly towards Bragg and the magistrate in his court case.
Trump’s attempt to push back the civil trial until at least May 23 highlights the exceptional difficulty of putting a former president on trial in either a civil or criminal matter before an objective jury, especially one who is constantly the target of heavy media scrutiny.
Trump’s legal woes are only expected to get more complicated as a number of other cases move closer to being indicted. This includes a probe being conducted by a prosecutor in the Atlanta area named Fani Willis, who said that indictments against Trump and his associates are “imminent” in a case involving their attempts to circumvent Georgia’s election regulations in 2020. At the federal level, Special Counsel Jack Smith’s probe into Trump’s suspected misuse of confidential documents is entering its final stages.
Tacopina made no mention of these other looming issues. Rather, he said he expects a post-Manhattan “cooling off period” through the end of May, when the immediacy of the Bragg news has faded. The next big milestone in this case is in August, when Trump is expected to file a motion to dismiss his case.
