DA Alvin Bragg responds to Trump's demand to kill verdict in hush money case
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg issued a response Thursday to Donald Trump's attempt to dismiss the ruling in the Stormy Daniels hush money case.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled earlier this month that Trump is immune from criminal prosecution for official acts carried out when president. Justices left it to lower courts to decide what is and is not an "official act."
Trump's lawyers took the ruling and used it to demand that the guilty verdict by the jury in the so-called "hush money case" be vacated. The lawyers asked Judge Juan Merchan if they could file a motion to set aside the verdict and have a hearing.
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Bragg's filing claims the New York case had nothing to do with official acts as the crimes took place before he was elected.
The brief says that Trump's arguments are "largely unpreserved." To make such an argument, Trump must have raised them during or before Trial and he didn't, it says.
Responding to the document, former ethics czar and impeachment lawyer Norm Eisen called it "devastating" for Trump's case.
"The Supreme Court official acts immunity decision in Trump v. US is bad enough," he said on X. "But as the DA points out, Trump's efforts to stretch it to cover this UNOFFICIAL acts case is even worse.
Trump also "raises objections as to six categories of evidence that he says should be excluded under the Supreme Court decision. But he failed to object during trial to four of the six. You can't say he didn't know about the issue bc he DID object to the other two!" Eisen wrote.
But the “most legally challenging issue,” he said, is about the status of the testimony from Trump’s former communications aide Hope Hicks. She was a Trump Organization employee who followed him to the campaign and then the White House.
She testified about things Trump told her while she worked at the White House in 2018. Eisen said that just because Hicks worked for the White House doesn’t mean their conversation involved presidential business.
MSNBC's Adam Klasfeld quoted prosecutors saying that even if all of the official acts in the Manhattan charges were removed, it would be “only a sliver of the mountains of testimony and documentary proof” the jury saw.
The day after the Supreme Court's ruling, former Department of Justice official Chuck Rosenberg commented that he didn't think a Trump appeal was going to work.
"I mean, if you look at the Supreme Court's decision from yesterday, ... the conduct that underlined in the New York case seems to me to be purely private," he pointed out. "So perhaps Judge Merchan grants them a hearing, but I have a hard time imagining that they would prevail on it."
Jurors convicted Trump in May on 34 counts of falsifying business records around hush money he paid to actress and director Stormy Daniels to cover up a tryst they'd had years prior. Trump denies the affair but paid Daniels the cash ahead of the 2016 election.