President Donald Trump asked a New York appeals court on Monday to overturn his felony conviction in the Manhattan hush money case, arguing that the trial “was fatally marred” by the prosecution using his official acts as president as evidence.
Trump’s lawyers submitted a 96-page legal filing, accusing the trial court of violating the evidentiary presidential immunity, which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled last year “bars the ‘use of evidence about’ a President’s official acts while in office.” The filing also argues that the district attorney used “a convoluted legal theory” to concoct a “purported felony,” and that the judge who oversaw the hush-money trial should have recused himself since he made political contributions to Democrats, POLITICO reported.
“President Trump’s legal team filed a powerhouse appeal in the Manhattan DA’s Witch Hunt, as the President continues his fight to put an end to the Radical Democrat Lawfare once and for all,” a spokesman for President Trump’s legal team said in a statement shared with The Daily Wire. “The Supreme Court’s historic decision on Immunity, the Federal and New York State Constitutions, and other established legal precedent mandate that this meritless hoax be immediately overturned and dismissed. President Trump will keep defeating Democrat weaponization at every turn as he focuses on his singular mission to Make America Great Again.”
If successful, the president’s appeal to the New York Supreme Court would erase his status as a convicted felon, after a Manhattan jury found him guilty on 34 counts of business fraud. The hush money case was brought by Manhattan Democratic District Attorney Alvin Bragg, and the trial was overseen by Judge Juan Merchan, who donated to Democratic causes, including to former President Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign.
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The hush money trial was held in the middle of Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign, with the May 30, 2024, conviction marking Trump as the first former president convicted of felony crimes.
“This is the most politically charged prosecution in our Nation’s history,” the legal filing begins. “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 (DANY) manufactured felony charges against a once-former and now-sitting President of the United States.”
The case stemmed from Trump’s hush money payments to porn actress Stormy Daniels, which he made in 2016 to keep her quiet about an alleged sexual encounter in 2006. Trump has maintained that he never had an affair with Daniels.
In Monday’s legal filing, Trump’s lawyers argue that prosecutors should have been prevented from pointing to conversations that were held between Trump and his former communications director, Hope Hicks, while Trump was in the White House. During the trial, the DA subpoenaed Hicks, who testified about conversations she held with Trump in the Oval Office, including a discussion she had with the president on “how he would like a team to respond to” a forthcoming Wall Street Journal story. Judge Merchan rejected the defense’s argument that the prosecution may not use Trump’s White House conversations as evidence. Weeks later, the Supreme Court handed down its ruling protecting presidential immunity in Trump v. United States.
“The trial court erroneously held that President Trump’s communications with Hicks were not official because, in the court’s view, they were ‘about personal matters involving an alleged affair and a sexual encounter that occurred prior to [President Trump] taking . . . office,'” Trump’s legal team argued.
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