Donald Trump’s hush money case in New York — the only one of his four criminal cases that looked likely to go to trial soon — suddenly faced the likelihood of a delay today when a large amount of potential new evidence abruptly became available.

News of the likely postponement came as the former president was in federal court in Florida for a separate hearing in another case — the one in which he is accused of mishandling classified documents, which even now has no set start date.

Tomorrow, a judge in Georgia is expected to rule in another of four cases on whether to disqualify the prosecutor who accused Trump and a group of his allies of tampering with that state’s 2020 election results – a decision that could be crucial in the fight against the elections. determine whether the case will go to trial this year, or not at all.

And in Washington, prosecutors and Trump’s lawyers are preparing for a showdown at the Supreme Court, which will hear arguments next month on Trump’s claim that he is immune from charges in the federal indictment accusing him of conspiring to overturn his election loss. Undo 2020. That case was originally scheduled to go before a jury this month.

The latest complications highlight how the justice system is struggling to balance fairness and speed against the backdrop of a calendar shaped by the presidential campaign. All four cases in recent weeks have somehow become further embroiled in procedural or substantive issues that have led to delays.

Time is everything

The issue of timing is critical in Trump’s prosecutions. After all, Trump is a unique defendant.

He secured enough delegates this week to ensure he will be the Republican nominee for a third straight election, and if he wins in November he would be able to use the powers of his office to push back the charges he faces. is facing away or postpone all trials until after he leaves office. And if he doesn’t appear in court in some or all four cases before voters go to the polls, Americans will choose their next leader without having a chance to hear all the evidence or have a jury determine his innocence or guilt to establish.

Some cases continue to progress, albeit slowly. At a hearing today in the classified documents case, Judge Aileen Cannon rejected one of Trump’s many requests to dismiss the charges.

The hush money trial, which was scheduled to begin on March 25, is just the latest case to be delayed. The surprising development came after the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which is handling the prosecution, proposed a delay of up to 30 days so the Trump team could review a new set of documents.

District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office tried to obtain the records from federal prosecutors in Manhattan from a separate investigation they conducted several years ago into the hush money payments, but only recently received them.

Trump, who has used a variety of tactics to delay his legal proceedings, asked for a 90-day delay to review reportedly tens of thousands of pages of new material. It is now up to the judge in the case, acting Supreme Court Judge Juan Merchan, to decide what should be done, although the fact that both sides in the case agree that there should be some form of delay means that this will almost certainly happen.

Merchan could give both parties what they want, or choose a grace period somewhere between their requests. Either way, it would mean the trial would start at least a month later than originally planned — potentially creating a cascading effect on the timing of the other trials in the heat of a presidential campaign unlike any other.

Your questions

We ask readers what they want to know about the Trump cases: the indictment, the proceedings, the key players or whatever. You can submit your question to us by completing this form.

If Trump were to win on November 5, could a trial not continue before he took office on January 20, because he would not yet be president? –Claire Keller, River Vale, New Jersey.

Alan: In short, yes. Any lawsuit against Trump could continue until Election Day, right up to the time of his inauguration — and possibly beyond. If Trump were to win the election, he would have the power on January 20, 2025, to order his new attorney general to dismiss any federal charges he faces and could try to delay any state charges in a number of different ways. . But none of that would happen automatically. It would require him or his lawyers to take action, and those actions could take some time to derail things.

Where is each criminal case?

Trump is at the center of at least four separate criminal investigations, at both the state and federal level, into matters related to his business and political career. Here’s where each case currently stands.

The Food and Drug Administration has decided to delay action on a closely watched Alzheimer’s drug, donanemab, which was widely expected to approve this month. The FDA will instead require donanemab to be examined by a panel of independent experts, the drug’s maker, Eli Lilly and Company, said Friday.

“The FDA has informed Lilly that it wants to better understand topics related to evaluating the safety and efficacy of donanemab, including safety outcomes in donanemab-treated patients and the efficacy implications of the unique trial design,” said the company in a statement.

The decision will likely surprise many Alzheimer’s experts, doctors and patients who had expected the drug to hit the market soon. The FDA’s move was surprising for the company, which had planned to greenlight the drug in the first quarter of this year.

“We didn’t expect this,” Anne White, Lilly’s executive vice president and president of neuroscience, said in an interview. She said that while the FDA often turns to such independent advisory committees when it has questions about drugs, it was unusual to do so “at the end of the review cycle and after the action date that the FDA gave us.”

The FDA has not publicly said anything about this move, which will delay a decision on whether to approve donanemab until at least later this year. Lilly officials said they expected it would be a few months before the advisory committee held a hearing.

“The FDA has promised us that they will take action quickly, so we hope they will take action shortly after the advisory committee,” Ms. White said.

The decision to convene an advisory committee reflects the high stakes and troubled history of developing treatments for Alzheimer’s disease. The disease affects more than six million Americans and currently has no cure and no medications that can restore memory loss or reverse cognitive decline.

For years, the field was characterized by failed drug trials. But donanemab, a monthly infusion, belongs to a new class of drugs that experts hope can help patients by attacking a protein, amyloid, that clumps into plaques in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease.

Last year, the FDA approved another drug in this class, Leqembi, made by Eisai and Biogen. By giving an infusion every two weeks, Leqembi can somewhat slow cognitive decline in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease.

The new drugs are considered only a first step in a potentially fruitful direction because they may not slow the decline enough to be noticeable to patients or families, experts say. The drugs also pose significant safety risks, including swelling and bleeding in the brain.

(The first drug approved in the anti-amyloid class, Aduhelm, was controversial because it had weak evidence; Biogen, the drug’s manufacturer, recently abandoned it.)

Donanemab was expected to gain approval easily because data showed the drug could also modestly slow cognitive decline in people with mild symptoms, and its safety risks were similar to those of Leqembi. Because donanemab’s study design was different from Leqembi’s and included some patients with more complex medical problems, the studies of the two drugs cannot be directly compared.

The donanemab study had two unusual aspects that the FDA indicated it would ask the advisory committee to review, said Dr. John Sims, medical director at Lilly and leader of the donanemab clinical trials.

One feature would be particularly attractive to patients: Study participants stopped receiving donanemab after their amyloid plaques cleared to a certain level — about a year for half of the participants who started donanemab — and their cognitive decline continued to slow . Lilly scientists estimate this would last almost four years so that the amyloid level rises above the threshold again.

Dr. Sims said he believed the FDA wanted to know more about stopping treatment because “it’s very unique” and that regulators might want to explore whether other anti-amyloid drugs could be stopped at some point.

Ms. White said there is a lot of enthusiasm among doctors and patients for this concept: once you achieve the goal you’re aiming for, you don’t have to put patients through additional infusions and visits.

The other unusual feature of the trial involved another protein, tau, which forms tangles in the brain after amyloid builds up. Higher tau levels are more closely linked to memory and thinking problems.

The donanemab study divided participants into groups with high tau levels and medium tau levels. People with moderate levels of tau showed greater slowing of cognitive decline – supporting a widely held theory that treating patients at the earliest possible stage of the disease process offers a better chance of slowing symptoms.

Dr. Sims said that measuring tau was “informative, but not necessary for initiating therapy for patients, and that we had treatment effects across the spectrum of tau.” He said the FDA had not indicated “the specifics of what they want to talk about” regarding tau, only that it was a topic the advisory committee would consider.

Ms White said: “There are a number of people here at Lilly who have been working on this for 35 years, so as you can imagine it was certainly a disappointment for them not to be able to bring this to patients now.” But she said the company was confident in its data and would consider in the coming months “additional analysis that we can do to answer any questions that someone might ask us.”

The White House's assessment of whether to release a transcript of a special counsel interview with President Biden that sparked a political furore is complicated by the sensitive material it covers, including classified information, security measures and discussions that could be subject to executive privilege. said people who knew about it.

The White House has been pressured by reporters seeking the transcript since the release last week of the report by Robert K. Hur, a special counsel who investigated Biden's handling of classified documents from his vice presidency after he had left office. And three Republican chairs of the House oversight committees have done so, too sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick B. Garland demands that he turn over both the transcript and the audio recording.

But while the White House has indicated it is considering releasing the material to support its claims that Hur's characterization of Mr. Biden's memory as “significantly impaired” was inaccurate and motivated by bias, it has made no commitment to do so to do. and has offered no timetable. It does not appear that such a revelation is imminent, according to people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal matters about why the review is challenging.

Mr. Hur, who was appointed by Mr. Garland and had previously served as a political appointee in Trump's Justice Department, ruled that “no criminal charges are warranted” against Mr. Biden even though there was classified material from his deputy presidency found at an office and in his home.

While the report said there was some evidence consistent with a conclusion that Mr. Biden deliberately retained the files without authorization, it also said the facts did not prove he did so and that other evidence was consistent with innocent statements .

But even as Mr. Hur concluded there was no criminal case pending, he also portrayed Mr. Biden as an “older man with a bad memory” who forgot in their interview which years his term as vice president began and ended and which years his term as vice president began and ended. year his son Beau died.

In a letter accompanying the report, Mr. Biden's government and personal lawyers — who were present for the interview — sharply disputed Mr. Hur's portrayal of the president's memory as unusually flawed, calling it both unnecessary as well as inaccurate. The pushback immediately raised the question of what the full transcript actually showed.

On February 9, the day after the report was made public, Ian Sams, a spokesperson for the Office of the White House Counsel, said: told reporters that it was a “reasonable question” to ask for the transcript to be released and said they would “need to resolve issues” such as the fact that the interview was about classified material. The White House has since backed down on his comments and declined to comment further.

But people familiar with the matter said classified material was just one of many complexities raised by the review, each related to its own potential bureaucratic process.

As for classified information, the transcript was considered top secret from the start because the interview focused on systems for how classified material is stored and used by presidents, vice presidents and their staffs. Some of the topics discussed in the documents found in Mr. Biden's office and home were also sensitive.

To undergo a declassification review, the transcript would have to be sent to various security-related agencies with an interest in topics discussed for their review and input on whether anything should be redacted before being released to the public, the people noted . These agencies may include the Pentagon, the State Department, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the CIA

Another problem is that Mr. Biden's home in Delaware was a major focus of the investigation. To the extent that the interview addressed issues such as the layout of the rooms in his home and its security measures, those portions of the transcript apparently need to be reviewed by law enforcement and Secret Service officials to ensure that no material is disclosed that could endanger safety. safety of the president and his family.

Yet another problem, the people said, concerns executive privilege. While Mr. Biden, advised by his lawyers, declined to exercise the privilege to block the release of anything Mr. Hur wanted included in his report, the five-hour interview had a much broader scope than the selections that the special prosecutor mentioned.

Mr Hur apparently asked Mr Biden about deliberations within the Obama administration on foreign policy matters. A key focus of the report was a memo Biden sent to President Barack Obama opposing the latter's decision in 2009, for example, to send a wave of additional troops to the war zone of Afghanistan.

To the extent the interview included a discussion of Mr. Biden's conversations with Mr. Obama, from vice president to president, or broader deliberations within the Cabinet and White House foreign policy team during the Obama administration, the people, the transcript could contain matters that Mr. Biden would choose to keep secret as privileged.

The doctrine of executive privilege allows the executive branch to keep material about high-level internal deliberations secret from Congress or the courts, preventing the disclosure of future internal discussions about how presidents should perform their duties execution is cooled down.

But especially since members of Congress requested the transcript, such redactions could lead to lawsuits later. For example, the House could subpoena the unredacted version of the transcript and then file a lawsuit if Mr. Garland, citing any assertion by Mr. Biden about executive privilege, refused to turn it over.

Against that backdrop, the process for formally asserting executive privilege is multifaceted. Such material is typically submitted by the White House to the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel, among others, for a review and analysis of whether certain matters are legitimately covered by the privilege as a legal matter.

As cities across the Northeast and New England prepared for what could be a major winter storm on Tuesday, dozens of school systems in a handful of states canceled classes, pulled the plug on after-school activities and otherwise adjusted their class schedules.

While the storm is not forecast to last, it will bring strong winds and coastal flooding in some areas, and school officials are not taking the impending weather lightly.

Here's a quick look at schools in the Northeast.

• Dozens of other school systems just north of the city closed Tuesday, including several in Mount Vernon, New Rochelle, Rye and White Plains.

• In New Jersey, where parts of the state could be blanketed in as much as a foot of snow, Newark Public Schools will be closed Tuesday, as will Jersey City and Paterson Public Schools. Further south, in Edison, public schools have opened with a delayed opening.

• The Philadelphia School District has a two-hour delay. Some surrounding districts, including Pottstown School District and Upper Merion Area School District, plan to host virtual learning days.

• Farther north in Massachusetts, Boston's public schools are closed, as are Plymouth and Salem's public schools.