New York prosecutors have urged a Manhattan judge to uphold Donald Trump’s criminal conviction, saying a recent Supreme Court decision That had little bearing on a jury’s unanimous decision finding the former president guilty of falsifying documents.
In a 69-page memo filed Wednesday and made public Thursday, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and prosecutors in his office called Trump’s efforts “meritless,” writing that the Supreme Court’s decision “has no bearing on these prosecutions and would not support them.” [vacating] “The jury’s unanimous verdict.”
Sentencing in the case, originally scheduled for July 11, was postponed after Trump’s lawyers have claimed A recent Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity supported their bid to overturn Trump’s conviction. They said some evidence and testimony should have been withheld from the jury because it related to protected official acts of the presidency.
The Supreme Court’s July 1 decision barred evidence implicating official acts of a president to be used in prosecutions, even if the charges involve unofficial activity. Trump was found guilty in May of 34 counts of falsifying business documents as part of a scheme to conceal reimbursements for a “Corruption“payment to an adult film star shortly before the 2016 election.
Trump’s lawyers argued a case filed earlier this month Much of the testimony and evidence presented at trial relating to Trump’s time in office should not have been allowed. This included testimony from former White House communications director Hope Hicks, former Oval Office operations director Madeleine Westerhout, Trump’s tweets during his presidency, and his disclosures to the Office of Government Ethics.
But prosecutors said Wednesday that very little of the evidence related to Trump’s official actions, saying anything that did was a “harmless mistake” that should not derail a case involving 22 witnesses and reams of documents.
They cited a preliminary ruling in the case in which a federal judge rejected arguments that the evidence had anything to do with official acts, calling the case a “personal element of the president.”
Trump’s lawyers argued in their filing that “mistakes related to presidential immunity are never harmless.”
“The harmless error doctrine cannot save the trial result,” they wrote. “The Supreme Court’s constitutional analysis … precludes the harmless error analysis.”
Judge Juan Merchan said he would rule on Trump’s motion to vacate the conviction on September 6. If Trump’s motion fails, sentencing would take place on September 18.
Trump, who is again the Republican presidential candidatecould face prison time in the case, but Merchan can also sentence him to a variety of lesser penalties, including probation.
