Prosecutors are urging a judge to uphold Donald Trump’s historic hush money conviction, arguing in court papers that the verdict should stand despite the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on presidential immunity.
The Manhattan district attorney’s office said in a court filing that the high court’s opinion “has no bearing” on the hush money case and does not support vacating the jury’s unanimous verdict or dismissing the case.
Prosecutors said Mr Trump’s lawyers failed to raise the immunity issue in a timely fashion and that, even so, the case involved unofficial acts — many pertaining to events prior to his election — that are not subject to immunity.
Lawyers for the former president and current Republican nominee are trying to get the verdict — and even the indictment — tossed out because of the Supreme Court’s July 1 decision.
It gave presidents considerable protection from prosecution.
The ruling came about a month after a Manhattan jury found Mr Trump guilty of falsifying business records to conceal a deal to pay off porn actor Stormy Daniels shortly before the 2016 election.
At the time, she was considering going public with a story of a 2006 sexual encounter with Mr Trump, who says no such thing happened. He has denied any wrongdoing.
He was a private citizen when his lawyer paid Ms Daniels. But Mr Trump was president when the attorney was reimbursed. Prosecutors say those repayments were misleadingly logged simply as legal expenses in Mr Trump’s company records.
The attorney, Michael Cohen, testified that he and the then-president discussed the repayment arrangement in the Oval Office.
Mr Trump’s lawyers have argued that prosecutors rushed to trial instead of waiting for the Supreme Court’s view on presidential immunity, and that the trial was “tainted” by evidence that should not have been allowed under the high court’s ruling.
Judge Juan M Merchan plans to rule on the Trump attorneys’ request on September 6. He has set Mr Trump’s sentencing for September 18, “if such is still necessary” after he reaches his conclusions about immunity.
The sentencing, which carries the potential for anything from probation to up to four years in prison, initially was set for mid-July.
But within hours of the Supreme Court’s ruling, Mr Trump’s team asked to delay the sentencing. Mr Merchan soon pushed the sentencing back to consider their immunity arguments.
Under the Supreme Court’s decision, lower courts are largely the ones that will have to figure out what constitutes an official act.
Indeed, even the conservative justices responsible for the majority opinion differed about what is proper for jurors to hear about a president’s conduct.
In a separate concurring opinion, Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote that the Constitution does not require juries to be blinded “to the circumstances surrounding conduct for which presidents can be held liable” and suggested that it would needlessly “hamstring” a prosecutor’s case to prohibit any mention of an official act in question.
Before the Supreme Court ruling, Mr Trump’s lawyers brought up presidential immunity in a failed bid last year to get the hush money case moved from state court to federal court.
Later, they tried to hold off the hush money trial until the Supreme Court ruled on his immunity claim, which arose from a separate prosecution — the Washington-based federal criminal case surrounding Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 presidential election loss.
Mr Trump’s lawyers never raised presidential immunity as a defence in the hush money trial, but they tried unsuccessfully to prevent prosecutors from showing the jury evidence from his time in office.
