Trump Appeals NY Hush Money Conviction, Citing Trial Errors (1)

President Donald Trump formally appealed his conviction in New York state’s so-called hush money case, arguing the verdict was the result of a flawed trial and a politically charged prosecution that sought to derail his 2024 presidential campaign.

In a filing late Monday with a state appeals court, Trump attorney Robert Giuffra said the felony charges levied by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg in April 2023 were “manufactured” under a “convoluted legal theory.” The jurors also heard improper evidence and the judge failed to remove himself from the case over conflicts of interest, the lawyer said.

A jury of 12 New Yorkers in May 2024 found Trump guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records to conceal a hush-money payment to a porn star on the eve of the 2016 election. The jury agreed with Bragg that the conspiracy had deprived voters of vital information about Trump’s conduct with women before the election, which Trump won.

“Like every criminal defendant in a New York courtroom, President Trump was entitled to a fair trial before a properly instructed jury and a neutral judge,” Giuffra said. “Instead, he was convicted after a trial that featured repeated and clear violations of his constitutional rights, federal law, and New York law, presided over by a judge who was required to recuse.”

Trump, 79, had faced as long as four years in prison when he was sentenced on Jan. 10 by Justice Juan Merchan in Manhattan. But Merchan declined to send Trump to jail, or issue a fine, saying the unusually light term was a direct result of a US Supreme Court ruling months earlier that gave the president broad immunity for acts while in office.

Bragg’s office declined to comment on Trump’s filing.

Trump’s appeal follows his earlier attempts to reverse the hush-money verdict through a separate appeal in federal court. His lawyers in June asked the US appeals court in Manhattan to overturn the conviction on the grounds that the case belonged in federal court. That case is ongoing.

The president’s legal team has prioritized the federal appeal as the quickest route to the US Supreme Court, which has already given presidents broad immunity from prosecution related to official acts. The payments at the center of the case were made while Trump was in office.

Trump argues that jurors heard improper evidence about discussions he allegedly had with aides about the hush money payment while he was in office in 2017, violating what his lawyer describes as presidential “evidentiary immunity” established by the Supreme Court.

He also argues that Merchan should have removed himself from the case because he donated to former President Joe Biden and his daughter’s advertising company was paid millions of dollars by Trump’s 2024 rival, then-Vice President Kamala Harris.

The filing in state court focused on claims that Trump’s defense team made throughout the criminal case, including that Bragg, a Democrat, improperly elevated a series of misdemeanors into a felony by using a New York law in a way that was never intended.

‘For Something’

“After years of fruitless investigation into decade-old, baseless allegations — and under immense political pressure to criminally charge President Donald J. Trump for something — New York’s district attorney manufactured felony charges against a once-former and now-sitting president,” Giuffra said.

Trump won the 2024 election six months after his conviction. The Justice Department then voluntarily dismissed its election-interference criminal case against Trump and dropped its appeal of the dismissal of his classified-documents case, citing a policy against prosecuting a sitting president.

Separately, an intermediate New York appeals court overturned a nearly half-billion penalty against Trump and his company in the state’s civil fraud lawsuit over the president’s asset valuations, calling it excessive. The appeals court left intact the court’s fining of liability. Both sides have appealed to New York’s highest court.

Trump has been been less successful challenging verdicts involving civil lawsuits filed against him by New York writer and former Elle magazine columnist E. Jean Carroll. In September, a federal appeals court in Manhattan rejected Trump’s bid to overturn a verdict ordering him to pay an $83.3 million defamation judgment to Carroll for repeated social media attacks and public statements he made after she accused him of sexual assault.

In a separate case, the appeals court in December upheld a $5 million verdict against Trump after he was found liable for sexually assaulting Carroll and then defaming her by calling her a liar.

(Updates with detail from the court filing.)

To contact the reporters on this story:
Erik Larson in New York at elarson4@bloomberg.net;
Patricia Hurtado in Federal Court in Manhattan at pathurtado@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story:
Misyrlena Egkolfopoulou at megkolfopoul@bloomberg.net

Anthony Aarons, Erik Larson

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