The Manhattan district attorney’s office said in court papers Thursday that a large cache of newly disclosed documents contained little that might influence or delay the criminal trial of Donald J. Trump, which is scheduled to begin in mid-April.

In a surprising move, the district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, agreed last week to allow a short delay in the trial to give Mr. Trump’s lawyers time to review the records. The documents had been turned over by federal prosecutors who had previously investigated Michael Cohen, the former president’s longtime fixer who is expected to be a key witness in Mr. Bragg’s prosecution.

Mr. Trump’s lawyers had cast the documents as a potential game-changing development in the intensely litigated case, which had been set to go to trial on March 25. But in Thursday’s filing, Mr. Bragg’s office downplayed the documents’ import, though it said its review was continuing.

“The people now have good reason to believe that this production contains only limited materials relevant to the subject matter of this case and that have not previously been disclosed to defendant,” the office said in the filing, adding: “The overwhelming majority of the production is entirely immaterial, duplicative or substantially duplicative of previously disclosed materials.”

It said that the trial’s currently scheduled start date — now set for April 15 — provides “a more than reasonable amount of time for defendant to review the information provided.”

Mr. Trump’s lawyers have asked the judge in the case, Juan M. Merchan, to dismiss the charges entirely or delay the trial until the summer and sanction the district attorney. A hearing before Justice Merchan is scheduled for Monday.

The lawyers have blamed Mr. Bragg’s prosecutors for the belated disclosure. The documents in question came from the office of the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, which obtained a guilty plea from Mr. Cohen in 2018.

Mr. Bragg’s office has denied responsibility for the delay, noting that it was Mr. Trump’s lawyers who waited until early this year to subpoena the documents from the Southern District.

Some of the recently disclosed records relate to Mr. Cohen’s phones. Mr. Bragg’s prosecutors argued that they had originally asked for the data, but federal prosecutors denied the request as “unduly burdensome.” When Mr. Trump requested the records this year, federal prosecutors obliged, authorizing disclosure “under the extraordinary circumstances of this case.”

Mr. Bragg’s prosecutors argued that much of the other information produced by the federal government was irrelevant to the D.A.’s case and instead related to other investigations into Mr. Cohen.

Mr. Trump is on the precipice of becoming the first former American president to be tried criminally, the result of an indictment by a Manhattan grand jury almost exactly a year ago.

The case centers on a hush-money payment Mr. Cohen made in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election to a porn star, Stormy Daniels, who said she had an affair with Mr. Trump. The district attorney has argued that the cover-up cheated voters of the chance to fully assess Mr. Trump’s candidacy.

Mr. Trump, who is again the presumptive Republican nominee for president, has denied the charges, casting the case as a politically motivated hit job by Mr. Bragg, a Democrat. He has also denied an affair with Ms. Daniels, who has said that she and the former president slept together once in 2006. She later tried to sell her story, leading to a payment from Mr. Cohen in exchange for her silence.

The Trump campaign’s communications director, Steven Cheung, blasted Mr. Bragg’s filing, saying he and his office “are still trying to explain away why they obfuscated and lied about these incredibly late disclosures.”

“No amount of dishonesty from their team can overshadow truth and transparency,” Mr. Cheung said.



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