Past President Donald Trump has asked a state court judge to throw out his New York criminal conviction. He is citing the Supreme Court’s recent decision on immunity, which says that a past president can’t be charged with a crime.
Judge Juan Merchan is expected to make it hard to overturn the jury’s decision, but the last-ditch effort was successful in delaying Trump’s sentencing.
Thursday was supposed to be a sentencing day, but Merchan pushed it back last week so he could have more time to read court briefs from both sides on the immunity issue. Prosecutors need to react to the latest filing by July 24. The sentencing date is now set for September 18.
Todd Blanche is in charge of Trump’s trial team. Their motion is mostly about a few examples of what they call “impermissible official-acts evidence.” This kind of evidence can’t be used in court anymore because it involves “core” presidential duties, according to the Supreme Court’s new decision. Trump’s lawyers say that his private conversations with Hope Hicks, who used to be the White House communications director, conversations about his power to pardon people, and his tweets were all wrongly accepted during the Manhattan case and need to be redone.
His lawyers had said before that Trump couldn’t be charged in the New York case, but Merchan wasn’t convinced. Since the high court’s decision came down more than a month after a Manhattan jury found Trump guilty, they say Merchan is “duty-bound” to follow it.
After weeks of testimony about a plan to illegally affect the 2016 election through a hush money payment to Stormy Daniels, who threatened to ruin Trump’s campaign with a story about having sex with him ten years ago, the jury found him guilty on 34 counts of falsifying business records. Trump has kept saying that he has never met Daniels, but he did not appear at the trial.
Even though none of the evidence at trial related to “core” presidential tasks, Trump’s lawyers focused on a part of the Supreme Court’s decision that says people in office are “presumed” not to be guilty of other crimes unless the government can prove otherwise.
However, the 52-page motion does more than just make legal points about immunity. It also repeats some of the things Trump said about Democrat District Attorney Alvin Bragg, saying that the case was politically motivated from the start and that Trump has been treated unfairly.
Blanche said that prosecutors were acting too proud to wait for the Supreme Court to rule on the issue of immunity. Instead, they insisted on going to trial right away, even though “no court has ever been faced with the question of a President’s immunity from prosecution.”
His team then said that the case was based on the evidence of just one witness: Michael Cohen, who used to work for Trump. They said that prosecutors used Hicks and other witnesses’ testimony to help their case in a way that the Supreme Court has now said is not allowed.
Trump is only likely to go through one criminal trial before the election in November, but his lawyers have also tried to use the Supreme Court’s decision in his Florida case over claims that he mishandled classified papers. The same defense team asked a federal judge last week to put the case on hold so that the lawyers could think about what the Supreme Court’s decision would mean. She agreed to get more formal information about the matter.
