After Monday's 6-3 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Trump v. United States, the case against former and potentially future President Donald Trump from Special Counsel Jack Smith was met with a major blow. Trump's legal team is now also asking that another case against him be set aside, in this instance, the "guilty" verdict on 34 felony charges to do with hush money payments. The conviction was handed down on May 30.
As The New York Timess citing "a person with knowledge of the matter," reported on Monday night, ahead of when the letter will be made public:
Donald J. Trump began an effort on Monday to throw out his recent criminal conviction in Manhattan and postpone his upcoming sentencing, citing a new Supreme Court ruling that granted him broad immunity from prosecution for official actions he took as president, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.
In a letter to the judge overseeing the case, Mr. Trump’s lawyers sought permission to file a motion to set aside the verdict, doing so just hours after the Supreme Court issued its landmark ruling involving one of Mr. Trump’s other criminal cases. The letter will not be public until Tuesday at the earliest, after which prosecutors will have a chance to respond.
The letter also asks that Trump's sentencing for July 11, which takes place just days before the Republican National Convention, be postponed:
The move from Mr. Trump’s lawyers came 10 days before the judge was set to sentence the former president for his crimes in Manhattan, where a jury convicted him on 34 felony counts related to his cover-up of a sex scandal in the run-up to the 2016 election. Mr. Trump’s lawyers asked the judge, Juan M. Merchan, to postpone the July 11 sentencing while the judge weighs whether the Supreme Court ruling affects the conviction.
The Court's opinion made clear that while presidents enjoy complete immunity from criminal prosecution, it is within the confines of their official acts as president. "The effort to set aside the conviction might be a long shot. The Manhattan case centers on acts Mr. Trump took as a candidate, not a president," the piece thus also mentions.
That being said, there's still some good news out of this, on a day where Trump himself has already expressed joy and a sense of victory [Emphasis added]:
Yet his lawyers are likely to argue that prosecutors built their case partly on evidence from his time in the White House. And under the Supreme Court’s new ruling, prosecutors not only may not charge a president for any official acts, but also cannot cite evidence involving official acts to bolster other accusations.
It is unclear how the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which brought the case, will respond, or whether the judge will delay the first sentencing of an American president. But Mr. Trump’s effort appeared to cause at least a brief interruption: The district attorney’s office did not on Monday make a sentencing recommendation to the judge about whether to imprison Mr. Trump, as was expected.
A spokeswoman for the district attorney’s office declined to comment.
It might be too late for Justice Merchan to revisit the conviction. The deadline for filing post-trial motions was last month, and it is unclear whether the judge will seriously entertain the motion, even in light of the high court’s decision. Instead, he might direct Mr. Trump’s lawyers to raise the issue when they appeal the conviction after he is sentenced.
The sentencing is likely to be the only moment of criminal accountability that the four-times indicted former president will face before Election Day, when he hopes to reclaim the White House. Mr. Trump faces up to four years in prison, but could receive probation on the convictions for falsifying business records — among the lowest level of felonies.
Mr. Trump’s other criminal cases are mired in delay, and the Supreme Court ruling on Monday will almost certainly postpone his trial in Washington, where he is accused of plotting to subvert the 2020 election.
Speaking of an appeal, as the excerpt mentions, the hush money trial is almost certainly going to be overturned, a point which has been raised by legal experts even before the Supreme Court handed down its decision in the Trump v. United States case.
The hush money case, as the piece acknowledges, "was arguably the least consequential of Mr. Trump’s four criminal cases..."
There are plenty of other concerns with such a case, as Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg charged Trump with felonies in the case when he could have brought them as misdemeanors, was using an untested legal theory, and after the statute of limitations had expired. Bragg is expected to testify on July 12 before the House Judiciary Committee, along with prosecutor Matthew Colangelo, who previously held a top spot in the Biden administration's Department of Justice.
The judge in the hush money case, Acting New York County Supreme Court Justice Juan Manuel Merchan, not only gave bizarre instructions to the jury about finding Trump guilty, but also has conflicts of interest through his adult daughter.
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