Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is urging a New York State judge not to toss former President Donald Trump's conviction in his hush-money case, The Hill reported. Trump's legal team has requested a review in light of a recent favorable U.S. Supreme Court decision for presidential immunity.
Trump was convicted of 34 felony counts in his hush money trial in May. Sentencing was set to take place this month, but New York State Judge Juan Merchan has delayed it until September.
The judge will have to consider how the Supreme Court decision in favor of Trump's presidential immunity could impact the verdict. The high court ruled on the issue in relation to a separate trial.
However, Trump's legal team believes that the decision still nullifies the guilty verdict since some of his conduct, now protected by the office thanks to the immunity decision, was brought up during the trial. Merchan countered that the high court's decision does not provide sufficient justification for his New York case.
Trump's attorneys contended that because of the Supreme Court's decision, any "impermissible official-acts evidence" that made it into the Manhattan trial was inadmissible if it was adjacent to the "core" of his official capacity as president. For example, they argued that Trump's conversation with then-White House Communications Director Hope Hicks was improperly included.
Trump had discussed topics such as his activity on Twitter as president and his pardon power with Hicks. "In order to vindicate the Presidential immunity doctrine, and protect the interests implicated by its underpinnings, the jury’s verdicts must be vacated and the Indictment dismissed," the legal document argued in light of those discussions being included in the trial.
To rebut Trump's position, Bragg's office submitted a 69-page response that was released publicly Thursday. As NBC News reported, Bragg said in the filing that the immunity decision "has nothing to say about the defendant’s conviction" in the Manhattan case.
"At issue in the Supreme Court’s decision was whether defendant could be federally prosecuted ‘for conduct alleged to involve official acts during his tenure in office.’ The criminal charges here, by contrast, exclusively stem from defendant’s ‘unofficial acts’ — conduct for which 'there is no immunity,'" Bragg's filing said.
The district attorney went on to say that "the evidence that he claims is affected by the Supreme Court’s ruling constitutes only a sliver of the mountains of testimony and documentary proof that the jury considered in finding him guilty of all 34 felony charges beyond a reasonable doubt." It remains to be seen whether the court will agree with Bragg or Trump.
Regardless of how this particular matter is settled, the conviction itself was unprecedented. Trump is not only a former president but also a current Republican candidate for president.
Moreover, Trump also has the distinction of being the subject of four separate criminal cases, though the New York case is the first to turn up felony convictions, Reuters reported. These facts already hinted at a politically motivated justice system that was trying to keep Trump out of the running.
The former president warned that booking him into jail would be the final straw. "I'm not sure the public would stand for it. I think it'd be tough for the public to take. You know, at a certain point, there's a breaking point," Trump said in June.
This all came before what Fox News confirmed was an attempted assassination against Trump in July. After seeing Trump's enemies attempt to kill him, seeing him jailed might be a bridge too far indeed.
There are many angles Trump's attorneys can use to dismantle this sham conviction. If the immunity angle fails, perhaps one of the others would do the trick in a case that stands on shaky legal ground.
