Prosecutors say immunity ruling has no bearing on Trump’s conviction

NEW YORK – Manhattan prosecutors are urging the judge who oversaw Donald Trump’s criminal hush-money trial to uphold his conviction, seeking to cast doubt on the former president’s long-shot bid to overturn the case because of a recent Supreme Court ruling.

In a court filing made public Thursday, the Manhattan district attorney’s office argued that the Supreme Court’s decision this month granting Trump broad immunity for official actions he took in the White House had “no bearing on this prosecution.”

Although the high court’s ruling was a blow to a separate criminal case against Trump in Washington, the Manhattan charges did not hinge on official acts. Instead, the Manhattan prosecutors noted, he was convicted in May of covering up a sex scandal that had threatened to derail his 2016 campaign, a personal and political crisis that did not involve his conduct as president.

Trump’s lawyers, seeking to link the two cases, have mounted a novel argument. In a recent filing to the judge who presided over the Manhattan trial, Juan M. Merchan, they contended that the Supreme Court’s decision had invalidated at least some of the evidence presented in Manhattan, including the testimony of former White House employees and tweets that Trump sent as president.

The Supreme Court, they noted, had held that official acts could be inadmissible as evidence – even if a case concerned private misconduct.

But the district attorney, Alvin Bragg, fired back this week, arguing that the former president’s lawyers had missed their window of opportunity to raise the immunity defense and then distorted the Supreme Court’s ruling once it emerged.

Prosecutors from Bragg’s office argued in the court filing that the ruling did not apply to the type of evidence they had deployed against Trump, and highlighted the personal nature of testimony that had nothing to do with Trump’s duties as president.

Even if it had, the prosecutors argued, they presented so much other evidence that “any error was harmless” and the guilty verdict should still stand.

“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,” the prosecutors wrote.

Todd Blanche, a lawyer for Trump, declined to comment on the district attorney’s filing. But in a two-page letter to Merchan on Thursday, he attacked “the jury’s flawed and unjust” verdict and argued that the prosecutors’ filing contained several “legal and factual misrepresentations.”

In his letter, Blanche also criticized the district attorney for what he described as “a desperate attempt to counter President Trump’s arguments for total dismissal of the lawless indictment.”

In a statement, Steven Cheung, a Trump campaign spokesperson, said that “the entire case is irreparably tainted.”

The dispute stems from the Supreme Court’s July 1 decision in Trump’s criminal case in Washington, where he is accused of plotting to overturn his 2020 election loss. The controversial ruling, which was decided 6-3 along partisan lines, held that a former president was “entitled to at least presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts.”

Within hours of the ruling, Trump’s lawyers in the Manhattan case asked Merchan to delay the former president’s sentencing in order to consider setting aside the verdict.

The judge agreed to rule on the verdict Sept. 6 and postpone the sentencing in the meantime. If he ultimately sides with prosecutors and upholds the conviction, he will impose a sentence Sept. 18.

Trump faces up to four years in prison, though Merchan could sentence him to as little as a few weeks in jail, or even probation.

The case centered on a salacious set of facts about Trump’s sex life and the great lengths he went to in order to keep them under wraps. In late May, after a seven-week trial, a jury of 12 New Yorkers convicted Trump on all 34 felony counts of falsifying records to cover up a hush-money payment to a porn actor, Stormy Daniels, in the final days of the 2016 campaign.

Trump’s fixer at the time, Michael Cohen, paid Daniels $130,000 to bury her story of a sexual liaison with Trump. Trump repaid Cohen soon after ascending to the presidency and approved plans to lie on company paperwork to hide the nature of the reimbursement, the jury found.

It is hardly Trump’s only legal entanglement: He was indicted in three other jurisdictions last year. But Trump, the current Republican nominee for president, has thrown up a number of legal roadblocks, including the appeal to the Supreme Court in the Washington case.

In the Manhattan case – the others will not make it to trial before Election Day – Trump has denied all wrongdoing and lashed out at the judge and Bragg, both Democrats. He has falsely portrayed them as members of a Democratic cabal doing the bidding of the Biden administration and his new opponent in the presidential election, Vice President Kamala Harris.

“No president of the United States has ever been treated as unfairly and unlawfully as District Attorney Bragg has acted towards President Trump,” Trump’s lawyers wrote in a motion this month seeking to throw out the case.

In the filing, Trump’s lawyers highlighted the trial testimony of two aides who worked for him when he was president, including Hope Hicks, his communications director. The testimony, the defense said, included mentions of “official communications” from the White House.

In one crucial portion of her testimony, Hicks told the jury about a discussion she had with Trump in the White House after the hush-money deal with Daniels came to light.

Hicks said that after The Wall Street Journal broke the story, she spoke to Trump about “how to respond.”

Trump’s lawyers also cited the testimony of Madeleine Westerhout, a former director of Oval Office operations, who told the jury about scheduling a February 2017 meeting between Trump and Cohen, during which Cohen said they discussed reimbursement for the hush-money payment.

Westerhout’s testimony, the defense said, included “observations of President Trump exercising presidential authority.”

“Your Honor now has the authority to address these injustices, and the court is duty bound to do so in light of the Supreme Court’s decision,” they wrote to Merchan.

But in response this week, Bragg’s prosecutors emphasized that Hicks and Westerhout were testifying about personal conversations, not official acts taken by a president. A meeting that simply took place in the White House is not automatically an official act.

Hicks’ testimony about her conversations with Trump, they said, concerned “discussions related solely to unofficial conduct.”

The prosecutors similarly stated that “much of Westerhout’s testimony involved details about how she helped defendant handle his private affairs – unofficial conduct that is not subject to any claim of immunity.” And they noted that Trump’s lawyers had largely failed to object to Westerhout’s testimony during the trial, a decision that might now preclude them from raising it after his conviction.

Trump, the prosecutors said, was also too slow to raise the immunity issue before the trial began. His lawyers did not do so until just days before the trial was set to start, prompting Merchan to reject the bid as untimely and “unjustifiable.”

In the filing this week, the prosecutors also disputed Trump’s claim that his tweets – and other public statements made as president – should be wiped from the record of the trial.

The statements were all already in the public record, the prosecutors noted, and the Supreme Court opinion noted that a “prosecutor may point to the public record” to illustrate an argument, even if it involves official acts.

Trump faces long odds, at least for now. Merchan has appeared skeptical of the former president’s immunity claims in the past, as has a federal judge, Alvin K. Hellerstein, who evaluated the case last year when Trump tried to move it to federal court.

Although Trump’s lawyers argued that the evidence centered on his official acts as president, Hellerstein noted in his opinion that “hush money paid to an adult film star is not related to a president’s official acts.”

“The evidence overwhelmingly suggests that the matter was a purely personal item of the president,” he wrote, “a cover-up of an embarrassing event.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.