A Manhattan judge should toss Donald Trump’s hush money conviction because his trial was “tainted” by wrongly introduced evidence from his time in the White House, the former president’s lawyers argued Thursday.
Jurors should not have heard about Trump, 78, telling his then-Communications Director Hope Hicks that “it was better” that porn star Stormy Daniels’ story about having sex with him came out after the 2016 election, lawyers Todd Blanche and Emil Bove wrote in a court filing.
The testimony was “devastating” evidence in favor of convicting Trump of falsifying business records by lying about reimbursing his ex-fixer Michael Cohen for the hush money payoffs, a Manhattan prosecutor said in his closing statement.
The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office also showed jurors copies of Trump’s tweets from the Oval Office in which he first praised Cohen before attacking him for flipping on him by implicating him to federal prosecutors.
Including that evidence, and others from Trump’s White House stint, “was a structural error under the federal constitution that tainted” the grand jury probe and trial in the hush money case, the ex-president’s lawyers argued.
Trump’s lawyers had asked Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan to delay the trial until the Supreme Court ruled on the immunity issue, but the judge ordered the trial to go ahead after prosecutors accused the presumptive Republican presidential nominee’s team of stonewalling.
“Rather than wait for the Supreme Court’s guidance, the prosecutors scoffed with hubris at President Trump’s immunity motions and insisted on rushing to trial,” Trump’s legal team wrote Thursday.
Trump’s sentencing has been pushed back to Sept. 10 so that his attorneys and prosecutors can grapple about how the Supreme Court’s ruling that presidents cannot be prosecuted for “official acts” impacts the former commander-in-chief’s guilty verdict for covering up payments to Daniels before the 2016 election.
Manhattan prosecutors’ response is due July 27. A spokesperson for Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg declined to comment.
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 find that the challenged evidence in question is relatively “harmless” to the overall case, and 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.