The Supreme Court dealt a blow to Trump’s federal election-interference case with its ruling granting presidents immunity — but his bid to overturn his hush money conviction is a long shot.
Donald Trump faces an uphill battle as he attempts to nix his hush money case using the Supreme Court’s recent bombshell ruling granting presidents immunity for “official acts,” legal experts say.
The high court’s Monday decision dealt a crushing blow to the federal election-interference case against the 78-year-old Republican — but his bid to overturn his Manhattan conviction in light of the ruling is a long shot.
“The notion of this conviction in a New York court proceeding being overturned because of this immunity decision is remote approaching zero chance,” Steven Cohen, an adjunct professor at New York Law School and former federal prosecutor, told The Post.Here’s everything you need to know about the SCOTUS ruling’s impact on Trump’s conviction:What is Trump arguing?
Trump’s lawyers are arguing that prosecutors in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office improperly allowed jurors to hear evidence from Trump’s time in the White House, including key testimony from his former top communications aide Hope Hicks.
Hicks testified that Trump, in a 2018 conversation when he was president, felt “it was better to be dealing” with sex allegations from porn star Stormy Daniels at that time than before the 2016 election.
The testimony was “devastating” evidence that the hush money payment to Daniels was part of an illegal “conspiracy” to hide her story from voters in 2016, prosecutor Josh Steinglass said in his closing statement.
Trump’s lawyers say jurors should not have heard the Hicks testimony, and other evidence from the ex-president’s stint in the White House that they claim unfairly influenced the jury.
“This official-acts evidence should never have been put before the jury,” the attorneys wrote in a letter to Merchan this week.
