President Trump urged a New York appeals court late Monday to overturn his hush money criminal conviction, insisting the judge should’ve recused and excluded evidence Trump asserts is protected by presidential immunity.
“This is the most politically charged prosecution in our Nation’s history,” Trump’s lawyers wrote.
A jury convicted Trump last year on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records for covering up a $130,000 hush money payment made to porn actor Stormy Daniels as part of a conspiracy to unlawfully influence the 2016 presidential election.
The president appealed his conviction in January after being sentenced to an unconditional discharge, meaning he faced no further penalties or fines. But the hush money case still cemented Trump’s status as a felon as he returned to the White House, even as his three other criminal prosecutions fizzled.
Monday’s filing by Trump’s six-lawyer team at the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell lays out his arguments in writing to New York’s Appellate Division, First Department. Trump contends Judge Juan Merchan while overseeing the trial proceedings erred in five separate ways that all command tossing the jury’s guilty verdict.
“President Trump’s legal team filed a powerhouse appeal in the Manhattan DA’s Witch Hunt, as the President continues his fight to put an end to the Radical Democrat Lawfare once and for all,” a spokesman for Trump’s legal team said in a statement.
The Hill has reached out to Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s (D) office for comment.
Much of Trump’s appeal concerns the Supreme Court’s new test that provides former presidents with broad criminal immunity over their official acts. Trump asserts the jury during the seven-week trial saw protected evidence, including testimony from White House aides and social media posts Trump sent while in office.
Merchan ruled none of the evidence was protected and that Trump had failed to preserve some of his arguments.
Trump’s appeal also contends Merchan wrongly denied the president’s demands to recuse from the case. The president and his allies have relentlessly attacked the judge as biased for donating $35 in total to former President Biden’s campaign and liberal groups as well as the judge’s daughter’s work at a progressive digital agency that boasts major Democrats as clients.
A state ethics advisory committee had told Merchan that he didn’t need to step aside.
Trump’s remaining arguments attack prosecutors’ legal theory that enabled them to peruse felony falsifying business records charges against Trump. He claims the charges are preempted by federal law and prosecutors did not prove Trump had the required “intent to defraud.”
“Targeting alleged conduct that has never been found to violate any New York law, the DA concocted a purported felony by stacking time-barred misdemeanors under a convoluted legal theory, which the DA then improperly obscured until the charge conference. This case should never have seen the inside of a courtroom, let alone resulted in a conviction,” Trump’s lawyers wrote.
