By Luc Cohen
NEW YORK (Reuters) – The Manhattan prosecutors who secured Donald Trump’s historic criminal conviction disputed the former U.S. president’s claim that the verdict should be set aside in the wake of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity.
In a court filing dated July 24 and made public on Thursday, the prosecutors said the Supreme Court’s ruling had no bearing on their case, which stemmed from hush money paid to a porn star.
“All of the evidence that he complains of either concerned wholly unofficial conduct, or, at most, official conduct for which any presumption of immunity has been rebutted,” prosecutors with Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office wrote.
Trump, the Republican nominee in the Nov. 5 election, was convicted on May 30 on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to cover up his former lawyer Michael Cohen’s $130,000 payment to porn star Stormy Daniels for her silence before the 2016 election about an alleged sexual encounter with Trump.
Trump denies any encounter with Daniels and has vowed to appeal the guilty verdict. He is the first U.S. president past or present to be convicted of a crime.
In a 6-3 ruling, the Supreme Court on July 1 ruled that presidents cannot face criminal charges over official acts, and that evidence of official acts cannot be used in a prosecution on private matters.
Legal experts say Justice Juan Merchan is unlikely to grant Trump’s request to toss the verdict, since much of the conduct at issue predated Trump’s 2017-2021 presidency and relates to personal matters, not official acts.
But Merchan delayed Trump’s sentencing from July 11 to Sept. 18, less than two months before the election, to allow his lawyers the chance to make their case.
Two weeks ago, Trump’s defense lawyers urged the judge to toss the jury’s guilty verdict because prosecutors relied on evidence of his official acts during the trial, which they said was improper in light of the justices’ ruling.
Trump’s lawyers took issue with introduction of evidence of Twitter posts Trump made in 2018 about Cohen, which prosecutors said showed Trump was aware that his former lawyer had paid off Daniels. Defense lawyers said those posts were official communications.
In their Thursday filing, prosecutors said Trump made the posts in his “unofficial capacity.”
Merchan has said he will decide on Trump’s arguments by Sept. 6. If the conviction is upheld, the case will proceed to sentencing. Once he is sentenced, Trump could formally appeal the verdict and the sentencing to a higher-level state court.
(Reporting by Luc Cohen in New York; Editing by Noeleen Walder and Daniel Wallis)
