New York prosecutors push back on Trump’s immunity claim

NEW YORK — Prosecutors are urging a judge to uphold Donald Trump’s historic hush money conviction, arguing in court papers made public Thursday that the verdict should stand despite the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on presidential immunity.

The Manhattan district attorney’s office said in a court filing that the high court’s opinion “has no bearing” on the hush money case because it involves unofficial acts for which a former president is not immune.

“There is no basis for disturbing the jury’s verdict,” prosecutors wrote in a 66-page filing.

Lawyers for the Republican presidential nominee are trying to get the verdict — and even the indictment — tossed out because of the Supreme Court’s decision July 1. The ruling insulates former presidents from being criminally prosecuted for official acts and bars prosecutors from pointing to official acts as evidence that a commander in chief’s unofficial actions were illegal.

Trump’s lawyers have argued that prosecutors rushed to trial instead of waiting for the Supreme Court’s view on presidential immunity, and that the trial was “tainted” by evidence that should not have been allowed under the high court’s ruling, such as tweets that Trump sent while he was president in 2018.

Prosecutors countered that evidence, which they said was indicative of a “pressure campaign” to keep his then-lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen from turning on him, “constitutes only a sliver of the mountains of testimony and documentary proof” that the jury considered before reaching its verdict May 30.

Even if the Supreme Court’s decision required that evidence be excluded from the hush money trial, “there would still need be no basis for disturbing the verdict because of the other overwhelming evidence of defendant’s guilt,” prosecutors wrote.

The Supreme Court ruled about a month after a Manhattan jury found Trump guilty of falsifying business records to conceal a deal to pay off porn actor Stormy Daniels shortly before the 2016 election. At the time, she was considering going public with a story of a 2006 sexual encounter with Trump. He denies her claim and maintains he did nothing wrong.

Trump was a private citizen — campaigning for president, but neither elected nor sworn in — when Cohen paid Daniels. But Trump was in office when Cohen was reimbursed. Prosecutors say those repayments were misleadingly logged simply as legal expenses in Trump’s company records. Cohen testified that he and Trump discussed the repayment arrangement in the Oval Office.

Judge Juan M. Merchan said he will rule Sept. 6 on Trump’s request to overturn the verdict and dismiss the indictment. The judge has set Trump’s sentencing for Sept. 18, “if such is still necessary.”

The sentencing, which carries the potential for anything from probation to up to four years in prison, was initially set for mid-July. But within hours of the Supreme Court’s ruling, Trump’s lawyers asked for a delay. Merchan soon pushed the sentencing back to consider their immunity arguments.

In its ruling, the Supreme Court did not define what constitutes an official act, leaving that matter to lower courts. Indeed, even the conservative justices responsible for the majority opinion differed about what is proper for jurors to hear about a president’s conduct.

In a separate concurring opinion, Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote that the Constitution does not require juries to be blinded “to the circumstances surrounding conduct for which presidents can be held liable” and suggested that it would needlessly “hamstring” a prosecutor’s case to prohibit any mention of an official act in question.

Before the Supreme Court ruling, Trump’s lawyers brought up presidential immunity in a failed bid last year to get the hush money case moved from state court to federal court.

Later, they tried to hold off the hush money trial until the Supreme Court ruled on his immunity claim, which arose from a separate prosecution — the Washington, D.C. federal criminal case pertaining to Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 presidential election loss.

Trump’s lawyers never raised presidential immunity as a defense in the hush money trial, but they tried unsuccessfully to prevent prosecutors from showing the jury evidence from his time in office.

Trump’s lawyers argue that presidential immunity should have ruled out some testimony from former White House communications director Hope Hicks and another aide, as well as some documents, including Trump’s 2018 financial disclosure report.

Nor, the defense said, should jurors have seen Trump’s tweets, arguing they were a president’s communications to Americans about something pertinent to his credibility as their leader.

Prosecutors maintained in the new filing that nothing about the messages was presidential.

“Defendant’s tweets conveying his personal opinion about his private attorney do not bear any conceivable relationship to any official duty of the presidency,” prosecutors said.