A judge will decide the future of President-elect Donald Trump’s New York criminal convictions on Tuesday as he considers throwing out the entire case.
Trump’s legal team has argued that Judge Juan Merchan should dismiss the case and his 34 convictions on falsifying business records charges because of presidential immunity doctrine. The president-elect’s legal team has said that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg rushed the case for political reasons and did not consider presidential immunity when he brought the case to trial.
The case stems from Trump being accused of improperly masking reimbursements to repay his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, for a $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels in exchange for her silence on an alleged extramarital affair by classifying them as legal expenses. A Manhattan jury convicted Trump in May on the charges. Trump has denied any wrongdoing and said that Bragg was engaging in politically motivated “election interference.”
The appeal from Trump’s legal team to dismiss the case refers to the Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision in Trump v. United States, which said presidents cannot be prosecuted for exercising core constitutional powers and are entitled to at least presumptive immunity from prosecution for official acts.
Todd Blanche, one of Trump’s lawyers, said that Bragg used testimony and evidence that should have been inadmissible during the trial. He said that Bragg “violated the Presidential immunity doctrine by using similar official-acts evidence in the grand jury proceedings that gave rise to the politically motivated charges in this case.”
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“The Presidential immunity doctrine recognized in Trump pertains to all ‘criminal proceedings,’ including grand jury proceedings when a prosecutor ‘seeks to charge’ a former President using evidence of official acts,” Blanche wrote in a filing earlier this year.
If Merchan does not throw out the case or set a new trial, Trump is expected to be sentenced on November 26. The judge said in September that he moved sentencing until after the election to “dispel any suggestion that the Court will have issued any decision or imposed sentence either to give an advantage to, or to create a disadvantage for, any political party and or any candidate for any office.”
Trump has also attempted to move the case away from Merchan to a federal court but has so far been rebuffed.
In a statement to USA Today on the case, Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said that Trump had been given “an overwhelming mandate to Make America Great Again.”
“It is now abundantly clear that Americans want an immediate end to the weaponization of our justice system, so we can, as President Trump said in his historic victory speech, unify our country and work together for the betterment of our nation,” Cheung said.
