Donald Trump’s lawyers have renewed their bid to toss his conviction for scheming to influence the 2016 presidential election by concealing a hush money payout to a porn star, claiming that prosecutors brushed over constitutional issues with the historic trial.
Trump’s attorneys urged Justice Juan Merchan for the second time in as many months to throw out the guilty verdict because jurors should not have heard key evidence in light of the US Supreme Court’s ruling immunizing presidents for “official acts.”
“The bell cannot be unrung,” lawyers Todd Blanche and Emil Bove wrote in a 21-page legal filing posted late Thursday in Manhattan Supreme Court.
White House Communications Director Hope Hicks’ testimony that Trump told her in 2018 that he was relieved Stormy Daniels’ lurid tale of a sex tryst with him emerged after the 2016 election is covered by “absolute immunity,” the lawyers claimed.
The discussion was sufficiently “official” because Trump was working at the time “to ensure that Hicks and her staff were prepared to address questions as she communicated with the media and the public on behalf of the White House regarding President Trump’s priorities and agenda,” they argued.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office has said the high court’s decision has “no bearing” on the case because Trump covering up the Daniels payoff by lying on his company records from the Oval Office was not an “official” presidential act.
Evidence like the Hicks testimony — which prosecutors called “devastating” for Trump — also represents “only a sliver of the mountains of testimony and documentary proof” used to convict him, prosecutors argued.
But Bragg’s office, according to Trump’s legal filing, “blatantly ignores” that the Constitution’s “take care” clause — which empowers presidents to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed” — is a “constitutional basis” that allegedly makes it an “official act” for Trump to speak with Hicks about Daniels.
Blanche and Bove also argued that Bragg’s office wrongly says that Trump’s legal team did not object to that evidence being heard before and during the trial, and is griping about the issue too late.
Prosecutors’ claim that the evidence in question did not make or break the case is “inadequate” in light of the Supreme Court’s ruling, Blanche added in the court papers.
Trump’s sentencing date has been pushed back to Sept. 18 so that both sides can grapple about how the high court’s decision impacts the ex-president’s felony falsifying business records conviction.
Merchan has said that he will rule on whether to scuttle the verdict by Sept. 6.
Trump has separately been charged in Georgia state court and Washington DC federal court with illegally trying to subvert the 2020 election results, and in a since-dismissed case was charged by the feds in Florida with illegally hoarding confidential documents at his Mar-A-Lago residence after leaving office.
The Manhattan case — the first-ever criminal trial of a US president — is almost certain to be Trump’s only criminal case to be heard by a jury before November’s presidential election.
New York attorneys have told The Post that Trump’s bid to to toss the hush money case on presidential immunity grounds is a long shot.
The judge is likely to agree with a federal judge’s July 2023 ruling that, “Hush money paid to an adult film star is not related to a president’s official acts,” the legal experts said.