Tag: General News

By Michael R. Sisak and Jennifer Peltz | Associated Press

NEW YORK — Donald Trump’s New York hush-money criminal trial was delayed Friday until at least mid-April as the judge seeks answers about a last-minute evidence dump that the former president’s lawyers said has hampered their ability to prepare their defense.

Manhattan Judge Juan Manuel Merchan agreed to a 30-day delay starting Friday and scheduled a hearing for March 25 after Trump’s lawyers complained that they only recently started receiving more than 100,000 pages of documents from a previous federal investigation into the matter.

Merchan said he is holding the hearing to determine if prosecutors should face sanctions or if the case should be dismissed, as Trump’s lawyers have requested.

The trial had been scheduled to start on March 25. The delay means the trial would start no earlier than April 15. Prosecutors had said they wouldn’t object to a short delay.

In a letter Friday, Merchan told Manhattan prosecutors and Trump’s defense team that he wanted to assess “who, if anyone, is at fault for the late production of the documents,” whether it hurt either side and whether any sanctions are warranted.

The judge demanded a timeline of events detailing when the documents were requested and when they were turned over. He also wants all correspondence between the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which is prosecuting Trump, and the U.S. attorney’s office, which previously investigated the matter in 2018.

The Manhattan district attorney’s office declined comment. Trump lawyer Todd Blanche also declined comment.

Merchan’s decision upended what had been on track to be the first of Trump’s four criminal indictments to go to trial. Trump, the presumptive 2024 Republican presidential nominee, has fought to delay all of his criminal cases, arguing that he shouldn’t be forced into a courtroom while he should be on the campaign trial.

Trump’s lawyers wanted a 90-day delay, which would’ve pushed the start of the trial into the early summer, and asked Merchan to dismiss the case entirely. Prosecutors said they were OK with a 30-day adjournment “in an abundance of caution and to ensure that defendant has sufficient time to review the new materials.”

Trump’s lawyers said they have received tens of thousands of pages of evidence in the last two weeks from the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan, which investigated the hush money arrangement while Trump was president.

The evidence includes records about former Trump lawyer-turned-prosecution witness Michael Cohen that are “exculpatory and favorable to the defense,” Trump’s lawyers said. Prosecutors said most of the newly turned over material is “largely irrelevant to the subject matter of this case,” though some records are pertinent.

The hush money case centers on allegations that Trump falsified his company’s records to hide the true nature of payments to Cohen, who paid porn actor Stormy Daniels $130,000 during the 2016 presidential campaign to suppress her claims of an extramarital sexual encounter with Trump years earlier.

Trump pleaded not guilty last year to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records and has denied having a sexual encounter with Daniels. His lawyers argue the payments to Cohen were legitimate legal expenses and were not part of any cover-up.

Prosecutors contend Trump’s lawyers caused the evidence problem by waiting until Jan. 18 — a mere nine weeks before the scheduled start of jury selection — to subpoena the U.S. attorney’s office for the full case file.

District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office said it requested the full file last year but the U.S. attorney’s office only turned over a subset of records. Trump’s lawyers received that material last June and had ample time to seek additional evidence from the federal probe, the district attorney’s office said.

Short trial delays because of issues with evidence aren’t unusual, but any delay in a case involving Trump would be significant, with trial dates in his other criminal cases up in the air and Election Day less than eight months away.

The defense has also sought to delay the trial until after the Supreme Court rules on Trump’s presidential immunity claims, which his lawyers say could apply to some of the allegations and evidence in the hush money case. The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear oral arguments April 25.

Trump has repeatedly sought to postpone his criminal trials while he campaigns to retake the White House.

“We want delays,” Trump told reporters as he headed into a Feb. 15 hearing in New York. “Obviously I’m running for election. How can you run for election if you’re sitting in a courthouse in Manhattan all day long?”

Mikael Wood | (TNS) Los Angeles Times

NEW YORK — Kacey Musgraves pulls her iPhone from the pocket of her black puffer vest and starts tapping her way to a recent exchange with a friend.

“We were literally just talking about this last night,” she says. “Hold on — I want to see how I phrased it.”

The 35-year-old country star is an enthusiastic user of Apple’s audio message feature, which she says offers two advantages over regular texting: “less time staring at a god— screen,” as she puts it, and the valuable emotional data contained in a person’s voice. “I can read a note from someone and think they’re mad at me,” she says. “But then I’ll hear it, and I’m like, Oh, they’re not!”

Musgraves finds the previous evening’s monologue and zeroes in on a section where she’s musing about how “there’s so much encoded in us from childhood — past trauma, past experiences — and all that goes into falling in love with someone.” She looks up and sighs. “It honestly freaks me out to think about just how much of chemistry with another person is beyond our control.”

The precarity of romance is on Musgraves’ mind because … well, really, the idea is never not on her mind. “I’m always making something a little more sad than it needs to be,” she says with a laugh of her music, including on her breakthrough 2018 LP “Golden Hour,” which documented her whirlwind marriage to a fellow Nashville, Tennessee-based singer-songwriter, Ruston Kelly. Blissed-out yet laced with a stoner-ish melancholy, “Golden Hour” won the coveted album of the year prize at the Grammy Awards, vaulting Musgraves from insider-y critics’ darling to pop-crossover fashion plate; three years later, she followed it up with “Star-Crossed,” which presented the tale of her and Kelly’s divorce as a Shakespearean tragedy.

Now she’s on the cusp of releasing “Deeper Well,” a gorgeous new LP inspired in part by the act of welcoming love back into her life.

“Please don’t make me regret/ Opening up that part of myself/ That I’ve been scared to give again,” she sings in “Too Good to Be True,” her close-miked vocal swaddled by finger-picked acoustic guitar. Later, in the Celtic-accented “Heaven Is,” she defines that place as “lying in your arms so safe and warm.”

Yet “Deeper Well,” due Friday, is also about cultivating one’s own strength through the rituals of therapy and self-care. In the title track she sings about setting aside her gravity bong and learning the lessons of her Saturn return — a trendy astrological reference similarly deployed lately by SZA and Ariana Grande. “Saturn can be a bitch of a planet,” Musgraves acknowledges, “but it’s having a moment.” In another track, “Sway,” she describes her determination to go with the flow like “a palm tree in the wind.”

“Kacey just wants to grow,” says Shane McAnally, the prolific Nashville songwriter who’s counted Musgraves as a friend and collaborator for more than a decade. “And this record feels like roots — like something you put down with your feet solidly on the ground.”

That goes for the album’s sound as well as its outlook. After toying with the sleek textures of Y2K-era pop and R&B for “Star-Crossed,” Musgraves returns on “Deeper Well” to the kind of rootsy, hand-played arrangements that defined her early work — and just as country music has become a go-to style for acts such as Beyoncé, Post Malone and Lana Del Rey, all of whom have country (or perhaps country-adjacent) projects on the way.

“Deeper Well” opens with the strummy “Cardinal,” in which she recounts being visited by that bird — a favorite of her mentor John Prine — not long after Prine’s death in 2020. Then there’s the waltz-time “The Architect,” a classic bit of down-home philosophizing she co-wrote with McAnally and Josh Osborne: “Even something as small as an apple/ It’s simple and somehow complex/ Sweet and divine, the perfect design/ Can I speak to the architect?”

“‘Star-Crossed’ was more hard-edged and acidic than all my other music,” she says today. “It was more affected in terms of production. And that was fun to play with. But I was definitely craving something different for this.” What she landed on feels both cozy and exploratory — a homecoming disguised as a vision quest.

Says Reese Witherspoon, who teamed with Musgraves last year to create the Apple TV+ series “My Kind of Country”: “I think it’s her most ethereal and introspective work.”

It’s a few days before Musgraves is set to perform this month on “Saturday Night Live,” and the singer is seated at a corner table in a restaurant on the Upper East Side. Dressed in black athleisure wear, her long hair tucked beneath a Polo ball cap, she speaks wistfully about New York City, where she and her two producers, Ian Fitchuk and Daniel Tashian, decamped from Nashville last year to make “Deeper Well” amid a motivating change of scenery.

“There’s always something weird to see here,” Musgraves says. “Last night we got stuck behind this trash truck that for some reason had bouquets of flowers tied to it.” She fondly recalls a late night singing karaoke and another one downing Guinness at an Irish dive bar; she describes the smell of weed in Washington Square Park as though it were a cherished childhood memory.

Tashian identifies one benefit to their immersion in New York’s much-ness. “I think for someone who has maybe slight ADHD tendencies — I don’t know if Kacey’s copped to that, but I can tell you from experience that she most certainly has a little of that going on — sometimes you need to be overwhelmed by the world to focus,” the producer says.

Indeed, there’s an almost Zen-like quality to the sparsely arranged “Deeper Well” that makes even the tasteful “Golden Hour” sound busy by comparison. “The small details define everything,” says John Janick, chairman and chief executive of Musgraves’ record company, Interscope Capitol Labels Group. “Each song is a delicate expression of self.” With echoes of Jim Croce and Simon & Garfunkel in their heads, Musgraves, Fitchuk and Tashian set up in the same warmly appointed attic space that Jack Antonoff favors at the historic Electric Lady Studios in the Village; for “Heaven Is” they moved out onto the building’s roof to catch a vibe.

Musgraves compares the album to “a walk through nature,” which she knows registers as an irony in light of the urban setting. But there’s something to that in the way the stripped-down music showcases the essentials of her astute songwriting and her high, clear voice.

“Kacey sings just like she talks,” says Chris Thile, whose band Nickel Creek will open for Musgraves on the road this fall. “The honesty of it disarms you at every turn.” Adds singer Madi Diaz, who recruited Musgraves to appear on her 2023 single “Don’t Do Me Good“: “She delivers the complexities of life the way we actually go through it.”

Does she ever regret writing so nakedly about relationships given that they’ve all eventually ended? (Some of the tenderest songs on “Deeper Well” refer to her romance with poet Cole Schafer, with whom she broke up last year.) Musgraves shakes her head.

“I think if you’re lucky you’re able to experience love several times,” she says. “Some people just have one. Look at my sister, who met her husband when they were 14 and 16, and now they’ve got a kid. Or my grandparents, who met in second and third grade — they’ve literally lived their entire lives together. I’m just different in that way. I’ve experienced many loves, and I just gather more information about myself with each one.” She smiles. “And then I write about it.”

Musgraves grew up in tiny Golden, Texas, and started singing (and yodeling) as a precocious kid in an oversize cowgirl hat. At 18 she flamed out on the televised singing competition “Nashville Star” but used the springboard to land work as a pro songwriter on Music Row; in 2011 she co-wrote “Mama’s Broken Heart” with McAnally and their pal Brandy Clark then watched as Miranda Lambert turned the song into a No. 2 country hit.

Her success behind the scenes led to a major-label record deal of her own. Yet right away Musgraves was scraping against country orthodoxy: “Follow Your Arrow,” from her 2013 debut, advised listeners to “roll up a joint” and to “kiss lots of boys — or kiss lots of girls if that’s something you’re into.”

“From Day 1, I feel like people have known exactly what I’m about,” she says. “Still one of the greatest compliments anyone’s ever paid me has been people in the LGBTQ community saying, ‘I’ve always loved country music but I never felt like I was invited to that party until I heard your music.’”

Nashville is more inclusive these days than it was a decade ago thanks in part to Musgraves, who’s maintained her efforts to diversify the industry, as with “My Kind of Country,” a competition show meant to spotlight talent from underrepresented backgrounds. (Asked what she makes of the broader political climate in Tennessee, where Gov. Bill Lee recently signed a law restricting drag performances, she says, “Pretty bleak,” and adds, “I don’t think it’s the drag queens that are desecrating society.”)

Still, she says, “I don’t feel like I need to be the spokesperson for country music.” In 2018, genre purists debated what it meant that “Golden Hour” contained a disco song in the shimmering “High Horse“; in 2021, the Recording Academy ruled that “Star-Crossed” wasn’t eligible for the Grammys’ country album category. Musgraves finds all the gatekeeping a bit boring. “I just do my own thing,” she says with a shrug — including cutting “I Remember Everything,” her hit duet with Zach Bryan that won the country duo/group performance award at this year’s Grammys ceremony.

Six months after it debuted atop Billboard’s Hot 100, “I Remember Everything” is still hanging around inside the chart’s top 10, which you can take as proof that the much-discussed country boom is real. But if Musgraves is always eager to reach new listeners — see her collaborations with Troye Sivan and Camila Cabello and her stint as Harry Styles’ warm-up act — she’s also wary of what she calls the “trap” of modern pop stardom, in which “people want you to be extremely authentic until your authenticity doesn’t align with whatever they want.”

There’s a song on “Deeper Well” called “Lonely Millionaire” that suggests she’s encountered fame’s illusory comforts. “Look, I’m not saying money doesn’t make things easier,” she says. “But the deeper I get into my career, the more I find refuge in the real, tangible, irreplaceable stuff.”

Next month Musgraves is due to launch a world tour behind “Deeper Well,” and she’s been trying to figure out how to bring the album’s intimate truths into an arena. She’s also considering covering SZA’s “Nobody Gets Me” — “It’d be sick, right?” she asks — and Sivan’s “One of Your Girls.” “So sweet, that little boy,” she says of Sivan. “I just want to put him in my pocket.”

A couple of years ago, Musgraves would’ve viewed a tour as a welcome opportunity to leave home. She’d bought a big fancy place in Nashville after her divorce — you can watch her give a tour to Architectural Digest on YouTube — but discovered before long that she didn’t feel comfortable there by herself.

“I was kind of scared of alone time — not scared, but trepidatious,” she says. “I’d get anxiety about being alone and not having anything on my schedule.” One night in 2022 she started perusing Zillow; she found a spot in the woods she liked and decided to live there instead.

Now she’s “gotten really good at being alone,” she says. “I actually feel recharged by it, which is the opposite of how I used to be.” She laughs. “When I’m home now, I could not see anyone for days and not give a s—.”

©2024 Los Angeles Times. Visit latimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.