Donald Trump’s legal team has requested permission on Monday to file a motion challenging the former president’s conviction in his criminal trial for paying a bribe to a porn star in New York, based on the US Supreme Court’s ruling a few hours earlier on presidential immunity, sources familiar with the initiative have informed CNN and the newspaper The New York Times.
Trump’s lead attorney has filed a letter with Judge Juan Merchan requesting permission to file a motion to challenge the verdict, with just 10 days until sentencing. If the judge allows Trump to file the motion, it could delay sentencing to allow the parties to brief on the matter. The letter will not be made public until Tuesday at the earliest, after which prosecutors will have a chance to respond.
Continuing to follow the dilatory strategy displayed during this and the other trials their client faces — three other criminal cases in Washington, Georgia and Florida — Trump’s lawyers have asked the judge to postpone the July 11 sentencing while he considers whether the Supreme Court ruling affects the conviction. However, a hypothetical overturn of the sentencing is a remote possibility, since the Manhattan case focuses on acts that Trump carried out as a candidate, not as president.
On May 30, a Manhattan jury found Trump guilty of 34 charges of falsifying business records to cover up the payment of a bribe to the actress on the eve of the 2016 election, in which he won over Democrat Hillary Clinton. The ulterior purpose of the payment was to prevent the scandal of his extramarital relationship from harming his electoral chances, something that the prosecution considered “a criminal plot to tamper with the outcome” of those elections. Trump is the first former US president to be convicted of a criminal.
The efforts of his lawyers have already had a brief reward: the office of prosecutor Alvin Bragg did not make a sentencing recommendation to the judge on Monday on whether to jail Trump, as planned, although the recommendation was required to remain secret until the 11th. The team of prosecutor Alvin Bragg declined to comment on the matter. The sentence could consist of a maximum of four years in prison or, considering that he has no criminal record, probation.
Trump’s attempt to challenge his conviction comes after the Supreme Court ruled earlier today that presidents enjoy absolute immunity from prosecution for their major official acts. The high court’s decision could not have been more timely for his interests, as the man who is almost certain to be proclaimed the Republican candidate for re-election two weeks from now at the Republican national convention in Milwaukee is trying to avoid other trials before the November elections in the three other criminal cases he faces, all of them politically motivated, two of them for trying to reverse the result of the 2020 election and the other for taking classified documents when he left the White House in January 2021.
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The Supreme Court decision, which was split along ideological lines — the six-member court’s conservative majority versus the three liberal justices — determined that Trump can claim criminal immunity for some of his actions as president before leaving office, which will likely further delay the three cases, especially the federal trial for election subversion stemming from his actions on January 6, 2021, when an angry mob of his supporters stormed the Capitol after being harangued by the then-president. If the Republican is re-elected in November, he could pardon himself since this is a federal case.
Before the Supreme Court gave him a reprieve today with its decision on presidential immunity, which makes it impossible for cases over the Republican’s role in the 2020 election to be heard before November, Trump’s legal team had also achieved another small victory: last week Judge Merchan partially lifted the gag order to prevent the former president from criticizing witnesses, jurors and judicial officials during the trial. Now Trump will be able to speak out about them.
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