While his administration prosecutes his political opponents, President Donald Trump is appealing his criminal conviction in a case that he calls “the most politically charged prosecution in our Nation’s history.”
Seeking to upend his loss in the so-called hush money case, Trump’s lawyers lean on the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling from another one of his criminal cases to argue that New York state prosecutors wrongly used evidence of his official presidential acts to convict him. The jury found him guilty last year of falsifying business records to cover up a hush money scheme in connection with the 2016 presidential race.
Citing the immunity ruling’s provision against using evidence of official acts to secure convictions for unofficial conduct, his lawyers point to evidence at trial from his first term in office: discussions with White House communications director Hope Hicks, statements on social media, discussion with the attorney general and testimony about White House operations.
In previous litigation at the trial level, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office argued that the immunity case “has no bearing on this prosecution” and that it wouldn’t support vacating the jury verdict “even if its reasoning did apply here.”
Trump’s brief was filed Monday to New York’s intermediate appeals court (the same court that recently gave him a partial win in his civil fraud appeal). After that court rules (it’s unclear when it will), the state’s top court could also weigh in. So could the U.S. Supreme Court, which hasn’t yet defined the outer limits of the immunity that it laid out in last year’s ruling for Trump in the federal election interference case. The president is separately trying to move the hush money appeal to proceed in federal court. Whichever path it takes, the final word on the case might not come for a while.
Trump was sentenced in January to an unconditional discharge, which was basically a non-punishment to allow the case to wrap up before he re-entered the White House. A divided Supreme Court declined to halt his sentencing, over the dissent of four Republican-appointed justices: Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.
Part of the rationale in the high court majority’s brief, unsigned order allowing the sentencing to proceed was that “the alleged evidentiary violations at President-Elect Trump’s state-court trial can be addressed in the ordinary course on appeal.” It’s that “ordinary course” that is now playing out.
The immunity issue is just one of the claims that Trump’s lawyers raise in the appeal. They also argue that the state prosecution was preempted by federal law, that the jury was wrongly instructed, that the evidence was insufficient, and that the presiding judge, Juan Merchan, should’ve recused himself.
The hush money case is the only one of Trump’s four criminal cases that went to trial. In his two federal cases — the classified documents case and the election interference case that produced the immunity ruling — the DOJ dropped them after he won the 2024 election, citing the department’s policy against prosecuting sitting presidents. The fate of the fourth case, a state election interference case brought in Georgia, is technically in limbo (though likely dead, in reality) after Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis was disqualified from prosecuting it. The president pleaded not guilty in all four cases.
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