MANHATTAN (CN ) — Manhattan prosecutors urged a New York judge not to toss former President Donald Trump’s guilty verdict in his hush-money criminal case, which Trump argued is now moot because of the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent ruling for broad presidential immunity.
In a 69-page court filing made public Thursday, the Manhattan district attorney told New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan to disregard Trump’s argument that certain evidence from the hush-money trial should have been withheld from the jury based on the landmark immunity decision.
“Contrary to defendant’s arguments, that decision has no bearing on this prosecution and would not support vacatur of the jury’s unanimous verdict (let alone dismissal of the indictment) even if its reasoning did apply here,” prosecutors wrote.
Trump has argued the entire case should be tossed because prosecutors elicited testimony from Hope Hicks about her efforts to downplay a 2018 Wall Street Journal article about Trump’s supposed adulterous behavior. Since Hicks was Trump’s presidential communications director at the time, Trump claims prosecutors violated his presidential immunity in getting her to testify.
Trump also argues prosecutors shouldn’t have been able to show the jury certain tweets that he made while president, since they constituted posts from “President Trump’s official White House Twitter account.”
But prosecutors said Thursday that this evidence only concerns Trump’s unofficial conduct, which is not protected under the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling.
“There is no basis for disturbing the jury’s verdict, and defendant’s motion should be denied,” they wrote.
Even if the evidence in question should have been withheld, prosecutors say they presented more than enough additional evidence at trial to prove Trump’s guilt anyway.
“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,” prosecutors wrote.
As such, the district attorney claims that any of these potential evidence issues are “harmless” to the sanctity of the verdict.
“If official-acts evidence was erroneously admitted at trial, the error was harmless in light of the overwhelming evidence of defendant’s guilt,” the state added.
The Supreme Court tossed Trump a legal lifeline on July 1 when it ruled that former presidents cannot be criminally prosecuted for official acts. It derailed Trump’s Washington D.C. criminal case on election subversion charges, but some experts are skeptical that it could apply the same way to his Manhattan hush-money case.
“The crux of the Manhattan trial is stuff that Trump did when he was campaigning for president, not when he was president,” retired New York judge George Grasso told Courthouse News earlier this month. “It’s hard for me to wrap my head around how that would link to the new Supreme Court decision on the scope of absolute immunity. I just don’t see that really intersecting with that case in a meaningful way.”
Still, the ruling has already disrupted Trump’s sentencing schedule. Merchan was initially slated to sentence Trump on July 11, but he pushed back the date to mid-September to allow the presidential immunity issue to be fully briefed.
Trump became the first U.S. president to be convicted of a crime when a Manhattan jury found him guilty on all 34 counts of falsifying business records. The historic conviction solidified prosecutors’ claims that Trump fudged official documents to cover up a hush-money scheme related to his 2016 presidential run.
Prosecutors argued that while he was running for president, Trump ordered his then-lawyer Michael Cohen to pay adult film star Stormy Daniels $130,000 to keep quiet about a 2006 tryst. When Trump repaid Cohen for the hush money, he falsely labeled the checks, invoices and ledger entries as compensation for legal fees, leading to his prosecution.
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