A New York judge ruled that Donald Trump Being elected President of the United States will not stop his quiet money trial continues The Hill reports.
Despite the US Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity, Judge Juan Merchan says otherwise. However, he remains undecided about the president-elect’s efforts to have the case thrown out entirely. Trump’s legal team argued that New York prosecutors presented evidence during the trial that would support the doctrine of presidential immunity. Some of the evidence included testimony from Trump’s White House aides, the president-elect’s tweets , when he was in office for his first term, and his form of government ethics.
However, Merchan ruled that Trump failed to raise his immunity objections at the start of the seven-week trial; therefore, the defense was denied. “The evidence relating to the reserved claims relates entirely to informal conduct and therefore does not receive immunity protection; and as to the unpreserved claims, this Court finds, in the alternative, that they are also dismissed on the merits because they relate entirely to informal conduct,” the judge wrote in his decision.
According to the Associated Press, Merchan said that even if evidence of official misconduct is found, he will still rule that prosecutors’ decision to use “these actions as evidence of determined personal acts of falsifying business records does not pose a threat; encroachment on the powers and functions of the executive.” He continued to push the narrative that even if prosecutors presented evidence that could be challenged through a claim of immunity, “such error was harmless in light of the overwhelming evidence of guilt.”
Trump was convicted in May 2024 of 34 counts of falsifying business records In connection with a $130,000 payment to porn star Stormy Daniels in 2016, which the businessman denies, he and members of his team were accused of conspiring to cover up Daniels in the final days of the 2016 presidential campaign in hopes of stopping him from going public.
Trump’s communications director, Stephen Cheung, called Merchan’s decision a “direct violation of Supreme Court immunity and other long-standing jurisprudence.” decision,” Cheung said in a statement.
“This illegal case should never have been initiated, and the Constitution requires it to be dismissed immediately.
The business of quiet money This is the first time the former president has been prosecuted and is the only one to sue. In his decision, Merchan highlighted how part of the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling stated that “not everything the president does is official,” writing that Trump’s social media posts, for example, are private. Another federal court ruling appears to have sided with the judge, concluding that the payment and reimbursements relate to Trump’s personal life and not his official life. duties.
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