Trump Leverages Immunity Decision in Bid to Overturn Conviction
Hours after the Supreme Court ruled Monday that presidents have “absolute” immunity from prosecution for official acts committed while in office, Donald Trump moved to have his hush money conviction in New York tossed.
According to CNN, in a letter to the judge overseeing the case, the former president’s legal team sought permission on Monday to file a motion to challenge the verdict. The filing arrived 10 days before Judge Juan Merchan was set to sentence Trump for his crimes in the Manhattan case, where the former president was found guilty on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records stemming from a payment to adult film actress Stormy Daniels.
In the letter, Trump’s attorneys asked the judge to move the sentencing to next week, and argued that the immunity decision confirmed their stance that District Attorney Alvin Bragg did not have the authority to introduce evidence at trial over the former president’s “official acts,” thus undoing the jury’s guilty verdict.
The district attorney’s office did not submit a sentencing submission on Monday, as was expected, per the outlet.
In the 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that “the nature of presidential power entitles a former president to absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority. And he is entitled to at least presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts. There is no immunity for unofficial acts.”
The case will be sent back to Washington’s lower court to determine which alleged acts in Trump’s indictment are official or unofficial.
Trump’s New York case is one of four criminal indictments against him. The high court ruling on Monday effectively guarantees the Justice Department’s ongoing election interference case against the former president will not go to trial before the election in November.
Following news of the decision, Will Scharf, an attorney for Trump, told CNN‘s Kaitlan Collins that the fake electors scheme to overturn the results of the 2020 election was actually “an official act of the presidency.”
In a sharp dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who was joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, wrote that the ruling made the president into “a king above the law.”
“The president of the United States is the most powerful person in the country, and possibly the world,” Sotomayor wrote. “When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.”
