NY.- Donald Trump has asked the judge overseeing his hush-money criminal trial in Manhattan to throw out his felony conviction now that the Supreme Court has granted Trump broad immunity from prosecution for official actions he took as president.
In a filing made public Thursday — the same day Trump was initially scheduled to be sentenced for his crimes — his lawyers argued that the Supreme Court’s recent ruling invalidated the verdict that the former president was guilty on charges of falsifying records related to hush money during his 2016 presidential campaign.
The ruling, which was decided 6-3 along party lines and drew condemnation from some legal scholars, dealt a blow to one of Trump’s separate criminal cases in Washington, in which he is accused of conspiring to overturn his 2020 election loss.
Applying that decision to the Manhattan case could be a risky bet. The judge, Juan M. Merchan, has been skeptical of Mr. Trump’s claims of immunity in the past. And even now, the Supreme Court’s ruling appears to have little direct bearing on the conduct for which he was convicted in Manhattan, where he was charged with crimes related to his campaign, not official acts during his presidency.
But Trump’s lawyers have argued that the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office based its case in part on evidence from his time in the White House. They point out that in the recent ruling, the Supreme Court held that prosecutors cannot subpoena most evidence involving official acts to prove allegations of private misconduct.
In this week’s filing, Trump’s lawyers cited trial testimony from two aides who worked for the then-president, including Hope Hicks, his communications director, about events at the White House. The testimony, the defense said, included “on-the-record communications.” They also argued that Manhattan prosecutors should not have invoked tweets and other public statements Trump made as president.
“Because of the implications for the institution of the presidency, the use of evidence based on official acts was a structural error under the federal Constitution that tainted” the case, wrote Trump’s lawyers, Todd Blanche and Emil Bove.
“These transgressions resulted in the kind of deeply damaging failure that strikes at the core of the function of government.”
Just hours before the Supreme Court issued its ruling on July 1, the defense asked Merchan to delay Trump’s sentencing to consider the possibility of vacating the verdict. The sentencing was scheduled for Thursday, just days before he was formally nominated for president at the Republican National Convention.
District Attorney Alvin Bragg agreed, and the judge announced he would rule on the motion on Sept. 6. If a sentence is “still necessary,” the judge would impose it on Sept. 18, he said. Trump faces up to four years in prison, though the judge could sentence him to as little as a few weeks in prison or probation.
Bragg was the first prosecutor to bring charges against Trump, who now faces four criminal cases in four different jurisdictions. But with the other cases mired in delays, Bragg’s is almost certain to be the only one that goes to trial before Election Day.
In May, a jury of 12 New Yorkers convicted Trump of 34 felony counts of falsifying records to cover up a hush-money payment to a porn actress, Stormy Daniels, in the final days of the 2016 campaign. His middleman at the time, Michael Cohen, paid Daniels $130,000 to hush up her story of a sexual relationship with Trump. When Trump returned the money to Cohen after becoming president, he ordered his employees to lie on company documents to conceal the nature of the repayment, the jury found.
Trump has falsely claimed that President Joe Biden orchestrated the Manhattan case (a prosecution over which he had no authority), portraying it as the product of Democratic intrigue. He has also claimed that he did not receive a fair trial, a claim echoed by his lawyers in this week’s motion, arguing that “no President of the United States has ever been treated as unfairly and unlawfully as District Attorney Bragg has acted toward President Trump.”
But now, they argue, Merchan “has the authority to address these injustices, and the court is obligated to do so in light of the Supreme Court’s decision.”
In their motion to overturn the verdict, Trump’s lawyers took a deep look at the prosecution’s questioning of Hicks, who, among other things, testified about a conversation she had with Trump at the White House after the Daniels settlement came to light in 2018. Hicks said that after The Wall Street Journal published the story, she spoke with Trump about “how to respond.” One prosecutor referred to some of her testimony as “devastating.”
The defense motion also highlighted testimony from Madeleine Westerhout, the former director of Oval Office operations, who told jurors about scheduling a February 2017 meeting between Trump and Cohen, where Cohen says they discussed reimbursement for hush money. Her testimony, the defense said, included “remarks of President Trump exercising presidential authority.”
Bragg’s prosecutors will likely argue that Hicks and Westerhout were testifying about personal conversations, not official acts performed by a president. Just because a meeting took place at the White House doesn’t make it an official act, they might say.
One federal judge has already backed that view. Before the trial, Trump attempted to move the case to federal court, arguing that the evidence focused on his official acts as President, but the federal judge rejected that argument, noting that the evidence against Trump “in no way reflects the character of the President’s official duties.”
In an opinion last year, Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein wrote that “money paid to an adult film star to keep quiet bears no relation to the official acts of a President.”
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