NEW YORK — A judge Monday rejected President-elect Donald Trump’s bid to have his hush money conviction dismissed because of the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent ruling on presidential immunity. But the case’s overall future remains unclear.
Manhattan Judge Juan M. Merchan’s decision eliminates one potential off-ramp from the case ahead of Trump’s return to office next month, but his lawyers have raised other arguments for dismissal.
Prosecutors have said there should be some accommodation for his upcoming presidency, but they insist the conviction should stand.
A jury convicted Trump in May of 34 counts of falsifying business records related to a $130,000 hush money payment to porn actor Stormy Daniels in 2016. Trump denies wrongdoing.
The allegations involved a scheme to hide a hush money payment to porn actor Stormy Daniels during the final days of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign to silence her claims that they’d had sex years earlier, which he denies.
A month after the verdict, the Supreme Court ruled that ex-presidents can’t be prosecuted for official acts — things they did in the course of running the country — and that prosecutors can’t cite those actions to bolster a case centered on purely personal, unofficial conduct.
In Monday’s ruling, Merchan denied the bulk of Trump’s claims that some of prosecutors’ evidence related to official acts, and so implicated immunity protections.
The judge said that even if he found that some evidence related to official conduct, he’d still find that prosecutors’ decision to use “these acts as evidence of the decidedly personal acts of falsifying business records poses no danger of intrusion on the authority and function of the Executive Branch.”
Trump’s lawyers cited the ruling to argue that the hush money jury got some improper evidence, such as Trump’s presidential financial disclosure form, testimony from some White House aides and social media posts made while he was in office.
Prosecutors disagreed and said the evidence in question was only “a sliver” of their case.
Trump takes office Jan. 20.
Trump communications director Steven Cheung on Monday called Merchan’s decision a “direct violation of the Supreme Court’s decision on immunity, and other longstanding jurisprudence.”
“This lawless case should have never been brought, and the Constitution demands that it be immediately dismissed,” Cheung said in a statement.