A New York judge ruled that Donald Trump being elected as President of the United States won’t stop his hush money trial from continuing, The Hill reported.
Despite the ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court on presidential immunity, Judge Juan Merchan says otherwise; however, he has not yet ruled on the President-elect’s efforts to toss the case out completely. Trump’s legal team argued that New York prosecutors introduced evidence during the trial that the presidential immunity doctrine would protect. Some evidence included testimony from Trump’s White House aides, tweets from the President-elect while he was in office during his first term, and his government ethics form.
However, Merchan ruled Trump failed to present his immunity objections early on in the seven-week trial; therefore, protections were rejected. “The evidence related to the preserved claims relate entirely to unofficial conduct and, thus, receive no immunity protections; and as to the claims that were unpreserved, this Court finds in the alternative, that when considered on the merits, they too are denied because they relate entirely to unofficial conduct,” the judge wrote in his ruling.
According to the Associated Press, Merchan mentioned that even if evidence were found to relate to official conduct, he’d still rule that the prosecutors’ decision to use “these acts as evidence of the decidedly personal acts of falsifying business records poses no danger of intrusion on the authority and function of the Executive Branch.” He continued to push the narrative that even if prosecutors introduced evidence that could be challenged through an immunity claim, “such error was harmless in light of the overwhelming evidence of guilt.”
Trump was convicted in May 2024 on 34 counts of falsifying business records in correlation to a $130,000 hush money payment to porn actor Stormy Daniels in 2016, which the businessman denies. He and members of his team were accused of conspiring a scheme to hide the payments to Daniels during the final days of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, in hopes of stopping her from going public.
Trump communications director Steven Cheung referred to Merchan’s decision as a “direct violation of the Supreme Court’s decision on immunity, and other longstanding jurisprudence.” “Today’s decision by deeply conflicted, acting Justice Merchan in the Manhattan DA Witch Hunt is a direct violation of the Supreme Court’s decision on immunity and other longstanding jurisprudence,” Cheung said in a statement.
“This lawless case should have never been brought, and the Constitution demands that it be immediately dismissed.”
The hush money case marks the first-ever criminal prosecution of a former president and the only one to make it to trial. In his decision, Merchan highlighted how part of the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling declared that “not everything the president does is official,” writing Trump’s social media posts were personal, as an example. Another federal court ruling seemingly sided with the judge, concluding the hush money payment and reimbursements pertained to Trump’s private life and not official duties.
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