A judge on Monday rejected President-elect Donald Trump’s request to have his hush money conviction overturned because of the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent ruling on presidential immunity. But the overall future of the case remains uncertain.
The ruling by Manhattan Judge Juan M. Merchan eliminates a potential outcome in the case before Trump returns to office next month, but his lawyers have raised other arguments in favor of dismissing the case.
Prosecutors have said accommodations should be made for his next presidency, but they insist the conviction should stand.
A jury convicted Trump in May of 34 counts of falsifying business records related to a secret $130,000 payment to porn actor Stormy Daniels in 2016. Trump denies any wrongdoing.
The allegations involved a scheme to hide a secret payment to porn star Stormy Daniels during the final days of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign in order to silence her claims that they had sex years earlier, which which he denies.
A month after the verdict, the Supreme Court ruled that ex-presidents cannot be prosecuted for official acts – things they did while running the country – and that prosecutors cannot invoke these actions to support a case focused solely on facts. personal and unofficial conduct.
In Monday’s ruling, Merchan essentially denied Trump’s claims that some of prosecutors’ evidence was tied to official acts and therefore implicated immunity protections.
The judge said that even if he concluded that some of the evidence was related to official conduct, he would still find that prosecutors’ decision to use “these acts as evidence of decidedly personal acts of falsification of business records poses no danger of intrusion into authority and function of executive power.
Trump’s lawyers cited the ruling to argue that the hush money jury obtained improper evidence, such as Trump’s presidential financial disclosure form, testimony from some White House aides and network posts social media posts while he was in office.
Prosecutors disagreed and said the evidence in question was only “a fragment” of their case.
Trump takes office on January 20.
Trump’s communications director, Steven Cheung, on Monday called Merchan’s decision “a direct violation of the Supreme Court’s ruling on immunity and other long-standing case law.”
“This illegal case should never have been brought and the Constitution requires that it be immediately dismissed,” Cheung said in a statement.
