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Manhattan prosecutors said there is no basis to overturn Donald Trump’s conviction in the hush money case after the Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity.
Any error, they argued in a filing Thursday, is “harmless” when viewed against “overwhelming evidence” of the former president’s guilt.
Trump’s lawyers argued his conviction on 34 counts of falsifying business records should be vacated after the Supreme Court ruled that evidence of a president’s official acts should not be used in a trial. They specifically highlighted testimony from former White House aide Hope Hicks and tweets from Trump’s Twitter account.
He is currently scheduled to be sentenced in September. The sentencing was delayed to allow arguments over the immunity issue.
Prosecutors with the Manhattan district attorney’s office said the conviction should stand.
The district attorney’s office argued that the crimes Trump was convicted of – falsifying business records to interfere in the 2016 presidential election – were not part of his “official acts” and that the Supreme Court’s ruling on evidence does not apply to this case. They also noted that Trump’s attorneys didn’t raise objections during the trial to most of the evidence they now question, arguing they can’t now challenge it after the trial.
“For all the pages that defendant devotes to his current motion, the evidence that he claims is affected by the Supreme Court’s ruling constitutes only a sliver of the mountains of testimony and documentary proof that the jury considered in finding him guilty of all 34 felony charges beyond a reasonable doubt,” prosecutors wrote.
“To the extent the Court concludes that any evidence of official presidential acts was improperly admitted at trial, defendant’s request to set aside the verdict should be rejected on harmless-error grounds because the trial record contains overwhelming evidence of defendant’s guilt,” prosecutors wrote.
The district attorney’s office argued that Trump’s tweets introduced at trial also did not constitute officials acts, because the subject matter “consists solely of ‘unofficial acts’ for which ‘there is no immunity.’”
“Defendant is wrong to claim that the recent Supreme Court decision would apply ‘absolute immunity with respect to these Tweets,’” prosecutors wrote. “To the contrary, the Supreme Court specifically recognized that defendant could make public statements — including Tweets — ‘in an unofficial capacity,’ such as if he spoke ‘as a candidate for office or party leader,’ rather than as the President exercising his Article II powers.”
They also downplayed the testimony from Hicks, who recalled for the jury a conversation she had with Trump in 2018. According to Hicks, Trump said it would have been bad for Stormy Daniels’ allegations to have come out before the election.
Honig on what’s next for Trump following SCOTUS decision on presidential immunity
Prosecutors said her testimony “was merely confirmatory of the mountain of other evidence proving beyond any doubt that defendant sought to conceal both the fact of his sexual encounter with Daniels and the broader Trump Tower conspiracy.”
The district attorney’s office also argued that the indictment should not be dismissed because the grand jury did not rely on evidence of “official acts.”
Trump’s lawyers asked the judge overseeing the case for permission to file a response to the district attorney’s filing.
