Donald Trump’s legal team has requested permission on Monday to file a motion challenging the former president’s conviction in his criminal trial for paying a bribe to a porn star in New York, based on the US Supreme Court’s ruling a few hours earlier on presidential immunity, sources familiar with the initiative have informed CNN and the newspaper The New York Times.
Trump’s lead attorney has submitted a letter to Judge Juan Merchan requesting permission to file a motion to challenge the verdict, with just ten days to go before sentencing is announced. Manhattan prosecutors have agreed to the request to postpone the criminal sentence so the judge can weigh whether the Supreme Court ruling could call his conviction into question. Merchan has since decided to postpone the sentencing to September 18.
True to the dilatory strategy displayed during this and the rest of the trials facing their client — three other criminal cases in Washington, Georgia and Florida — Trump’s lawyers had asked the judge late on Monday to postpone the July 11 sentencing while he considers whether the Supreme Court ruling affects the conviction. However, a hypothetical annulment of the sentence is a remote possibility, since the Manhattan case focuses on acts that Trump carried out as a candidate, not as president, and also the Supreme Court ruling establishes immunity in official, not private, actions.
On May 30, a Manhattan jury found Trump guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records to cover up a bribe payment to the actress on the eve of the 2016 election, in which he won over Democrat Hillary Clinton. The ulterior motive of the payment was to prevent the scandal of his extramarital affair from harming his electoral chances, something that the prosecution considered “a criminal plot to tamper with the outcome” of those elections. Trump is the first former US president to be convicted of a criminal.
The efforts of his lawyers have already been rewarded: hours after the office of prosecutor Alvin Bragg failed to make a sentencing recommendation to the judge on Monday on whether to jail Trump, as planned, the official notification of the postponement of sentencing is almost a victory for the Republican. The sentence could consist of a maximum of four years in prison or, considering that he has no criminal record, probation.
Trump’s attempt to challenge his conviction comes after the Supreme Court ruled earlier today that presidents enjoy absolute immunity from prosecution for their major official acts. The high court’s decision could not have been more timely for his interests, as the man who is almost certain to be proclaimed the Republican candidate for re-election two weeks from now at the Republican national convention in Milwaukee is trying to avoid other trials before the November elections in the three other criminal cases he faces, all of them politically motivated, two of them for trying to reverse the result of the 2020 election and the other for taking classified documents when he left the White House in January 2021.
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The Supreme Court decision, which was split along ideological lines — the six-member court’s conservative majority versus the three liberal justices — determined that Trump can claim criminal immunity for some of his actions as president before leaving office, which will likely further delay the three cases, especially the federal trial for election subversion stemming from his actions on January 6, 2021, when an angry mob of his supporters stormed the Capitol after being harangued by the then-president. If the Republican is re-elected in November, he could pardon himself since this is a federal case.
Before the Supreme Court gave him a reprieve today with its decision on presidential immunity, which makes it impossible for cases over the Republican’s role in the 2020 election to be heard before November, Trump’s legal team had also achieved another small victory: last week Judge Merchan partially lifted the gag order to prevent the former president from criticizing witnesses, jurors and judicial officials during the trial. Now Trump will be able to speak out about them.
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