We don’t blame Donald Trump’s criminal defense lawyers Todd Blanche and Emil Bove for asking Acting Manhattan state Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan on Monday to throw out their client’s 34 felony convictions in the Stormy Daniels hush money/election interference case. We are sure that Trump pushed them to make the request once the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on the issue of presidential immunity that morning.
And we don’t blame Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg for agreeing to hold off on Trump’s sentencing next week to allow for both sides to submit their papers to the judge.
And we don’t blame Merchan for rescheduling the matter (but did it really have to be September? Taking an August vacation perhaps Your Honor?)
It’s all fine because the 10-week delay won’t likely change anything except that Trump will be sentenced on Sept. 18 instead of July 11.
We doubt that Trump read Chief Justice John Roberts’ decision (since it’s more than a page long), but Blanche and Bove and Bragg and Merchan have. And so have we and there is no way that the Stormy case is anything but very, very personal and not connected to Trump’s official duties in the White House, which are immune from prosecution.
From Trump’s 2006 Lake Tahoe rendezvous with the porn actress to Michael Cohen’s $130,000 payoff to Daniels in October 2016 to Trump ordering the faking up his business records in 2017 (the crime) to reimburse Cohen, nothing is official. The conviction should stand.
Blanche and Bove claim that evidence used by Bragg from the White House is now off limits, but that’s hooey, as such evidence, like phone logs and Trump tweets and Trump’s personal financial disclosure form, are matters of public record and Robert addressed this in a footnote that he wrote to allay concerns of his colleagues that presidential bribery could not be pursued.
The footnote says: “But of course the prosecutor may point to the public record to show the fact that the president performed the official act.” There’s no official act being alleged here, just the public record being used concerning the purely personal act. Robert continues: “What the prosecutor may not do, however, is admit testimony or private records of the president or his advisers probing the official act itself.” Again there’s no official acts here. Just some public records.
So the sex (which Trump claims didn’t happen, as he said in last week’s debate: “I didn’t have sex with a porn star,”) the payoff, the reimbursement and the doctoring of the Trump Organization’s books are all non-official acts. And non-official acts are fair game, even in the mind of John Roberts.
Manhattan Federal Judge Alvin Hellerstein already ruled as much, writing that “The evidence overwhelmingly suggests that the matter was a purely personal item of the president — a cover-up of an embarrassing event. Hush money paid to an adult film star is not related to a president’s official acts. It does not reflect in any way the color of the president’s official duties.”
After he is sentenced in September, Trump can include his new immunity claim in his appeal, which has to go to the Manhattan appellate bench and then the state Court of Appeals in Albany and only then to the U.S. Supreme Court.