MANHATTAN (CN) — Former President Donald Trump asked a New York judge Thursday to toss the guilty verdict in his Manhattan hush-money trial, claiming that certain evidence should have been withheld from the jury given the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity this month.
“No president of the United States has ever been treated as unfairly and unlawfully as District Attorney Bragg has acted toward President Trump in connection with the biased investigation, extraordinarily delayed charging decision, and baseless prosecution that give rise to this motion,” Trump claimed in the 55-page filing, made public Thursday on his lawyer’s website.
Trump argued that under the Supreme Court’s bombshell ruling, Manhattan prosecutors violated the U.S. Constitution by relying on evidence of Trump’s official acts as president.
Among that evidence is Trump’s communications with his then-communications director Hope Hicks, who testified at trial about her efforts with Trump to downplay a 2018 Wall Street Journal article about his supposed adulterous behavior. Because Trump was president at the time, he claimed that his communications with his aide should have been off-limits to the jury.
He said the Supreme Court ruling “specifically forbids prosecutors from offering ‘testimony’ from a president’s ‘advisers’ for the purpose of ‘probing the official act.’”
Trump said prosecutors shouldn’t have been able to show the jury certain tweets of his, as those constituted posts from “President Trump’s official White House Twitter account.” In one 2018 post, Trump criticized The New York Times for “going out of their way to destroy Michael Cohen and his relationship with me in the hope that he will flip.”
“DANY improperly used official-acts evidence relating to tweets attributed to President Trump in 2018, which were posted to a Twitter account that President Trump used as an official channel of White House communication,” Trump said of the tweets.
Trump also accused Manhattan prosecutors of scrambling to try him in the spring while the Supreme Court was still mulling this decision. He chided them for “scoff[ing] with hubris at President Trump’s immunity motions and insisted on rushing to trial.”
“DANY urged this court to front-run the Supreme Court on a federal constitutional issue with grave implications for the operation of the federal government and the relationships between state and federal officials,” Trump said in his motion. “The record is clear: DANY was wrong, very wrong.”
Trump is likely to face an uphill battle in getting the verdict tossed on grounds of presidential immunity. The Supreme Court’s decision, which ruled that former presidents have absolute immunity for official acts, derailed his Washington D.C. criminal case on election subversion charges, but it might not matter to this hush-money case in Manhattan.
“The crux of the Manhattan trial is stuff that Trump did when he was campaigning for president, not when he was president,” retired New York judge George Grasso said in an interview last week. “It’s hard for me to wrap my head around how that would link to the new Supreme Court decision on the scope of absolute immunity. I just don’t see that really intersecting with that case in a meaningful way.”
Still, the ruling has already delayed the former president’s sentencing. New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan was supposed to sentence Trump this week, but agreed to postpone it until mid-September to allow the parties to fully brief the presidential immunity issue.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has until July 24 to respond to Trump’s motion. A spokesperson for Bragg’s office declined to comment on Trump’s argument.
Trump made history in May, when he became the first U.S. president to be convicted of a crime after a Manhattan jury found him guilty on all 34 counts of falsifying business records. The jury agreed with prosecutors’ assertion that Trump used the phony records to cover up a hush-money scheme related to his 2016 presidential run.
The scheme centered around Trump’s desire to conceal his 2006 sexual encounter with adult film star Stormy Daniels, who was paid $130,000 by Cohen — Trump’s then-lawyer — to keep quiet during his 2016 presidential campaign. When Trump repaid Cohen for the hush money, he falsely labeled the checks, invoices and ledger entries as compensation for legal fees, leading to his prosecution.