President Donald Trump just got a boost in his ongoing appeal of his New York state hush money conviction, thanks to the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling in his federal election interference case.
President Donald Trump just got a boost in his ongoing appeal of his New York state hush money conviction, thanks to the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling in his federal election interference case. That boost came Thursday, when a federal appellate panel ordered a federal district judge to reconsider Trump’s bid to move his hush money case from state to federal court, where Trump appears to think he has a more favorable path to reversing his conviction.
The new ruling, from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit, doesn’t mean that the president will necessarily succeed in overturning his conviction. But it reinforces that the immunity ruling continues to help him and could ultimately lead to upending the guilty verdict in the only one of his criminal cases that went to trial prior to his 2024 election. (His win led to both of his federal criminal cases going away, due to the Justice Department’s policy against prosecuting sitting presidents.)
The removal issue arose when Trump’s lawyers tried multiple times to move the hush money case from state to federal court, including after he was convicted in May of last year of falsifying business records to cover up a hush money scheme in connection with the 2016 presidential race.
After the Supreme Court decided his unrelated appeal in the immunity case in July of last year, his lawyers pressed for moving the hush money case to federal court on the basis of that decision.
