Supreme Court immunity ruling has no effect on Donald Trump hush money conviction, Manhattan DA says

NEW YORK — Manhattan prosecutors on Thursday asked a judge to uphold Donald Trump’s conviction for falsifying records in a hush money scheme to hide claims that he cheated on his wife with Stormy Daniels from voters — arguing the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity ruling has “nothing to say” to say about the case despite what Trump claims.

Trump’s lawyers earlier this month asked Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan to vacate his conviction and dismiss the underlying indictment in light of the July 1 ruling by the Supreme Court’s conservative majority finding that most actions undertaken by presidents in the course of “official acts” are immune from criminal prosecution.

Opposing the request in new filings, Assistant District Attorney Matthew Colangelo argued that Trump’s conviction for reimbursing his personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, for hush money under the table and the underlying scheme were utterly unrelated to his official duties.

“(All) of the evidence that he complains of either concerned wholly unofficial conduct or, at most, official conduct for which any presumption of immunity has been rebutted. The Supreme Court’s recent ruling thus has nothing to say about defendant’s conviction,” Colangelo wrote.

“(The) scheme was entirely personal and largely committed before the election, and it had no relationship whatsoever to any official duty of the presidency,” the prosecutor later wrote.

The jury’s May 30 verdict finding Trump guilty of 34 felonies determined he falsified records to cover up payback to Cohen for silencing Daniels, illegally documenting checks to him as compensation for legitimate legal services.

The verdict made him the first U.S. president to be criminally convicted and could be his only conviction if he wins the election. He still faces two other criminal cases in Fulton County, Georgia, and Washington, D.C., alleging he plotted to overturn President Joe Biden’s win in 2020, in which he’s pleaded not guilty. Neither case is expected to make it to trial before the election, and it’s unclear whether they ever will if he wins.

The federal case in Florida alleging Trump hoarded classified documents after his presidency and hid them from authorities was dismissed by a Trump-appointed judge in a decision that sent shockwaves through the legal community last week. Federal prosecutors are appealing the ruling, which could take years.

Although Trump’s Manhattan case mostly centered on the year leading up to his presidency — when prosecutors alleged the hush money scheme was carried out to win the election — his defense team has argued that any evidence presented to jurors relating to his time in office in 2017 and 2018, including the reimbursement to Cohen, was out-of-bounds, thus nullifying the verdict. The Supreme Court’s immunity decision, which is expected to pare down Trump’s federal election subversion case significantly, also blocked prosecutors from presenting evidence of presidential acts while trying to prove a president’s unofficial acts were against the law.

Among other examples, Trump’s defense team has argued that testimony by his campaign manager and then White House communications director, Hope Hicks, was impermissible. She told jurors that in early 2018, Trump acknowledged he reimbursed Cohen for paying off Daniels and said it would have been worse had the payoff been reported by the media before the 2016 election. In their motion, they also cited tweets Trump fired off from his official presidential account on Twitter, now known as “X,” which prosecutors presented as evidence that Trump tried to intimidate Cohen from cooperating with authorities probing the hush money scheme.

In the filing made public Thursday, prosecutors said that even if some evidence was improperly admitted at trial, Merchan should let Trump’s conviction stand as the trial record contained “overwhelming evidence” of his guilt.

“For all the pages that defendant devotes to his current motion, 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,” Colangelo wrote.

“Under these circumstances, there is no basis for disturbing the jury’s verdict, and defendant’s motion should be denied.”

Merchan granted a defense request to delay Trump’s sentencing, initially slated for July 11 until Sept. 18, “if such is still necessary” following the Supreme Court ruling. He’s expected to rule on Trump’s request to throw out the verdict by Sept. 6.

Attorneys for Trump did not immediately respond to requests seeking comment.