Trump faces uphill fight as lawyers return to court in hush money case: legal expert

According to former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance, Donald Trump's lawyers are headed to court on Tuesday where they will try to make the case that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg's 34-count case related to hush money payments to an adult film star belongs in federal court.

As Vance notes on her website, the former president's lawyers aren't disputing the payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels, but are claiming that his dealings with her were, with regard to federal election laws, committed while he was President of the United States that was within the “color of his office" – making it a federal matter and not one to be dealt with by Manhattan's District Attorney.

According to the former prosecutor, the argument made by his lawyers seems destined to fail.

As she wrote, "The nutshell version is that Trump has the short side of the argument here and removal is unlikely. "

"If the conduct Trump is charged with in Manhattan didn’t take place 'under color of' his official federal duties, then there is no rationale for transferring it. And since Trump is charged with paying hush money to a porn star and falsifying records in order to get elected, it’s hard to see how he can shoehorn the facts into the law here," she explained before citing conservative attorney George Conway who dismissed the claim out of hand.

"As George Conway put it at the time, even if Trump signed the checks to Cohen on the Resolute desk in the Oval Office, that doesn’t make the payoffs part of his official duties," she wrote before concluding, "It defies common sense to believe that these kinds of election shenanigans were done on behalf of the American people."

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