Manhattan DA tells judge to reject Trump's bid to toss conviction on immunity grounds
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s (D) office told a state judge to reject former President Trump’s claims that his recent guilty verdict must be set aside following the Supreme Court’s landmark presidential immunity ruling.
New York Judge Juan Merchan delayed Trump’s criminal sentencing until September to first consider his claims that prosecutors improperly introduced protected, official acts as evidence at his recent hush money trial.
In a 69-page response made public on Thursday, Bragg’s office said none of the challenged evidence is protected, and even if it was, “any error was harmless in light of other overwhelming evidence of defendant's 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,” Assistant District Attorney Matthew Colangelo wrote in the office’s response.
“Under these circumstances, there is no basis for disturbing the jury's verdict, and defendant's motion should be denied.”
In May, Trump became the first former U.S. president to be convicted of a crime when a New York jury found him guilty of lying in New York business records with an intent to unlawfully influence the 2016 presidential election.
Prosecutors say Trump unlawfully disguised payments to his then-fixer, Michael Cohen, as a legal retainer, when they were in fact reimbursement for him paying porn actor Stormy Daniels $130,000 to stay quiet about an alleged affair with Trump. The former president denies any affair.
Trump has never argued that he has presidential immunity from the 34 counts themselves.
But after the Supreme Court carved out immunity for former presidents earlier this month, he latched onto a portion of the decision prohibiting prosecutors from bringing in official acts as evidence, even if they are charging unprotected conduct.
Trump contends his jury improperly saw protected acts such as his government ethics form, some of his tweets while in office and testimony from two of his White House aides.
In their response, prosecutors argued at length that the conduct in question was unofficial.
“The Supreme Court has long recognized that a President can act in an unofficial, personal capacity. Nothing in the Court's recent immunity decision changes that basic fact … This case involved evidence of defendant's personal conduct, not his official acts,” Colangelo wrote.
Prosecutors also said Trump hadn’t made timely objections to much of the challenged evidence. Even if the judge does believe there was impropriety, prosecutors said the error was harmless so the verdict should stand.
“There is no reasonable possibility that the limited evidence discussed above (even assuming that it should have been excluded) meaningfully contributed to his conviction,” prosecutors wrote.
Merchan, the judge, is expected to make a ruling on Trump’s immunity claims just after Labor Day. If he denies the former president’s motion, the case will proceed to sentencing on Sept. 18.
—Updated at 4:10 p.m.