HUSH MONEY CASE BACK ON TRACK? — Manhattan DA ALVIN BRAGG said in a filing today that the overwhelming majority of some 200,000 pages of documents recently turned over by the Southern District of New York are not relevant to his prosecution of DONALD TRUMP and shouldn’t delay the case. Recall that the case was supposed to go to trial on Monday, March 25, before Judge JUAN MERCHAN last week ordered a 20-day postponement while he sorted out the impact of a last-minute document dump. The parties are scheduled in court on Monday to hear from both sides about what happened. In Bragg’s filing today, he offers a detailed chronology of the yearlong back-and-forth between his office, SDNY and Trump’s defense team over the cache of documents held by the feds. One mystery was why SDNY didn’t turn over all of these documents when Bragg asked for them in early 2023. Bragg only partially answers that question today. For instance, Bragg says that SDNY only recently obtained five FBI interview memos, so they can’t be blamed for failing to produce them a year ago. A sixth memo was in their possession then but outside the scope of Bragg’s subpoena. While Bragg says his “review is ongoing,” he says the only materials he’s identified as relevant to the case are 172 pages of notes pertaining to lawyer MICHAEL COHEN’s meetings with special counsel ROBERT MUELLER and “fewer than an estimated 270 documents” from Cohen’s phones. Those records, Bragg claims, are mostly “inculpatory and corroborative of existing evidence” — in other words, bad news for Trump. If Bragg’s characterization is accurate, the case seems unlikely to be delayed further, as Trump wants, and the more extreme remedies Trump is requesting (sanctions, dismissal of the charges, precluding Cohen from testifying) are unlikely to be taken seriously by Merchan. Trump’s lawyers, of course, might take a different view of the document cache. Monday’s hearing will give us a fuller picture — and perhaps even a new trial date. NOMINATION WOES — Sen. JOE MANCHIN (D-W.Va.) today became the second Democratic senator to oppose ADEEL MANGI’s judicial nomination, making his path forward through the Senate exceedingly difficult. NEW IDEA FOR UKRAINE — “US Backs $50 Billion Ukraine Bond Using Frozen Russia Assets,” by Bloomberg’s Alberto Nardelli and Jennifer Jacobs Good Thursday afternoon. Thanks for reading Playbook PM. Drop us a line at rlizza@politico.com and eokun@politico.com. BIDEN’S POPULIST POLICY PUSH — It’s no question that President JOE BIDEN’s reelection campaign is struggling in the polls against Trump; more than 30 pollsters and operatives from both parties say he’d lose if the election were now, Time’s Charlotte Alter, Brian Bennett and Philip Elliott report in a wide-ranging look at Biden’s campaign woes. The latest Emerson College/The Hill polls find Biden still losing slightly in Michigan and Wisconsin, even as Democratic Rep. ELISSA SLOTKIN and Democratic Sen. TAMMY BALDWIN lead Republican opponents in the Senate races. (There are small signs of movement: His approval rating has hit 40% for the first time in five months.) Biden plans to depend on Michigan Gov. GRETCHEN WHITMER and Baldwin to give him a boost, NBC’s Adam Edelman reports. And even as Biden’s inner circle remains defiant about his odds, lots of Democratic strategists warn in the Time story that his team is running an outdated playbook and falling short on everything from messaging to staffing to ground game, at least so far. But as he tries to turn things around, Biden might benefit from a range of populist new policy moves, many announced today, that follow in the vein of the agenda he laid out in his State of the Union address: Antitrust: Could AG MERRICK GARLAND finally get your Android user friends’ texts to stop showing up as green on your iPhone? The Justice Department slapped Apple with a major antitrust lawsuit, long in the works and filed with many states, that aims to tackle what it deems an unfair business monopoly. The blockbuster case is just the latest significant effort by the Biden administration to go after the titans of Big Tech, and it “comes after years of allegations by critics that Apple has harmed competition with restrictive app store terms, high fees and its ‘walled-garden’ approach to its hardware and software,” CNN’s Brian Fung, Hannah Rabinowitz and Evan Perez write. Apple denies doing anything wrong. Student debt: Biden rolled out another tranche of student debt forgiveness today, adding 77,000 borrowers and their $5.8 billion in debt to the list of Americans granted relief, per CNBC’s Annie Nova. After the Supreme Court struck down Biden’s wide-ranging debt relief program, he’s adopted a piecemeal approach that has managed to wipe out a large swath of debt — more than one-third of the sum he initially sought to erase. Today’s announcement affects Public Service Loan Forgiveness borrowers. Housing: New White House policy proposals today recommend that the federal government get much more aggressive about tackling restrictive local zoning to get more housing built, NYT’s Jim Tankersley and Conor Dougherty report. Other actions would aim to lower housing costs. Taken together, they “could serve as a blueprint for a major housing push if Mr. Biden wins a second term.” Read the report Taxes: Corporate and private jets are the latest focus of the IRS’ tax crackdown on the wealthy, with Treasury Secretary JANET YELLEN in Congress today lauding the effort to crack down on the abuse of write-offs, NYT’s Alan Rappeport reports. Biden’s budget would also seek to raise taxes on corporate jets, though that’s unlikely to become reality.
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