Trump appeals conviction in 2024 hush money case
By: Aysha Bagchi
USA Today
..... President Donald Trump is arguing in an appeals of his 2024 hush money criminal conviction that the verdict rested on a series of "fatal flaws," including evidence he says should have been blocked based on the immunity form his first presidency.
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"This is a case of many damaging firsts," Trump's lawyers wrote in the filing submitted to the New York appeals court late October 27. [2025]
..... It "should never have seen the inside of a courtroom, let alone resulted in a conviction."
..... Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg's office didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
..... A 12 person jury unanimously convicted Trump in May 2024 on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to cover up a 2016 payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels, concluding that Trump's then-lawyer, Michael Cohen, paid Daniels $130,000 during Trump's first presidential campaign to stay quite about an alleged sexual encounter she had with Trump, who has repeatedly denied the encounter happened.
..... In July 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that former presidents can't ever be prosecuted for certain core parts of their presidencies, and also that evidence of various official presidential acts can't be presented to a jury.
..... Trump's lawyers seized on the latter portion of the high court's ruling, arguing that even though that conviction centered on personal business records tied to conduct before his first presidency, the jury scrutinized evidence of official presidential acts in order to reach its guilty verdicts.
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For instance, Hope Kicks, who served as the White House miscommunications director during Trump's first presidency, testified about discussing with Trump about how to respond to a news article that was going to describe Daniels' nondisclosure agreement. That testimony, according to Trump's lawyers, was about official presidential conduct and was prohibited under the Supreme Court's ruling.
..... Trump's legal team also argued that Bragg shouldn't have been able to prosecute Trump because federal prosecutors declined to bring charges under a federal law that deals with campaign activity.
..... That blocks state prosecutors from brining a similar case, the lawyers said.
..... Furthermore, Trump's lawyers contended that the jurors should have been told they not only had to unanimously agree on Trump's guilt but on the precise reason he was guilty.
..... And they said Judge Juan Merchan should have recused himself due to a 435 donation he made in 2020 to a Democrat-aligned entity, ActBlue, with $15 of that contribution designated for the former President Joe Biden's 2020 presidential campaign.
..... A New York commission that reviews judicial conduct dismissed a complaint against Merchan about that donation, although it did caution him, as first reported by Reuters.
..... Trump's New York hush money case was the only one of his four criminal cases to go to trial.
..... Two federal criminal cases were dropped when Trump won the 2024 presidential election.
..... the fate of a fourth criminal case, brought in Georgia, is unclear; a state appeals court said the local district attorney can no longer prosecute the case due to a romantic relationship she had with another prosecutor.