Prosecutors agree to Trump request to postpone ‘hush money’ sentencing

The Manhattan district attorney’s office has agreed to a request from Donald Trump’s legal team to postpone his criminal sentencing in the recent “hush money” trial to allow the judge to consider their argument that Monday’s US supreme court ruling calls his conviction and the entire trial into question. The judge overseeing the case in New York last night delayed sentencing until September 18th.

In a legal victory for Mr Trump on Monday, the supreme court found that presidents were immune from prosecution for “official acts”. The former president’s legal team is claiming that the supreme court ruling on presidential immunity nullifies the legitimacy of the Manhattan “hush money” trial, after which he was found guilty on 34 felony charges. The charges were related to what prosecutors claimed was a conspiracy to influence the 2016 presidential election by buying the silence of an adult film star with whom he had a sexual encounter.

The former president was due to face sentencing by judge Juan Merchan on July 11th, just four days before the Republican convention takes place in Milwaukee.

It is expected that his team will argue that the case should be thrown out on the grounds that some of the evidence presented in the Manhattan trial – tweets, White House ledgers and the witness evidence of Hope Hicks, his former White House communications officer about conversations with Mr Trump – all represented a time period when he was in the White House and, consequently, corrupts the entire trial.

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“What we have in New York is a situation where a substantial number of official acts of the presidency were used as evidence to support the charges in that trial,” Will Scharf, one of the lawyers who represented the former president in that Manhattan trial, said on Monday night.

“We believe that that corrupts the trial, that it indicates that the jury evidence needs to be overturned and that at the very least we deserve a new trial where those immunity acts will not come into evidence.”

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That legal challenge represents the first live consequence of the far-reaching supreme court ruling on presidential immunity, which has provoked a stunned and, in many cases, alarmed reaction from legal and historic scholars across the United States.

Although the ruling, handed down by chief justice John Roberts, did not specifically relate to Mr Trump, it means the various charges for which he is due to stand trial in Florida, Georgia and Washington DC are unlikely to go ahead before the November election.

However, attorney Tim Heaphy who led the investigation into January 6th for a congressional committee, stated his belief that at the very least, Jack Smith, the chief prosecutor against Mr Trump in relation to electoral interference charges, would get to present those charges before the court in late summer or early autumn.

“Justice Roberts’s opinion explicitly says that there are things that a president does that are not official; that are undertaken in his role as a political candidate,” Mr Heaphy said.

“Most of what is alleged in the special counsel’s indictment, he will argue I think persuasively, is not official conduct but activity the president did as a candidate for re-election.”

[ US presidential immunity ruling: ‘With fear for our democracy, I dissent’, supreme court judge says ]

The developments occur in the wake of president Joe Biden’s unscheduled address on Monday night when he took issue with the supreme court ruling and warned the American public that it instantly and radically changed the understood parameters and limitations of the power of the president. He quoted the closing words of the dissent of the supreme court justice Sonia Sotomayor.

“She said that in every use of official power the president is now a king above law. With fear for our democracy, I dissent. End of quote. So should the American people dissent. I dissent.”

Meanwhile, as the Biden campaign team seeks to reassure Democratic anxiety over the president’s poor performance in the televised debate with Donald Trump last week, US representative Lloyd Doggett became the first congressional Democrat to call for Mr Biden to withdraw from the presidential race.

Mr Doggett, of Texas, said: “Recognising that, unlike Trump, president Biden’s first commitment has always been to our country, not himself, I am hopeful that he will make the painful and difficult decision to withdraw. I respectfully call on him to do so,” Mr Doggett said in a statement.

Illinois congressman Mike Quigley, a long-time supporter of Mr Biden, said on Tuesday: “What I’m stressing is that it should be his decision, but we have to be honest with ourselves that it wasn’t just a horrible night.

“But I won’t go beyond that out of my respect and understanding for president Biden, a very proud person who has served us extraordinarily well for 50 years. I just want him to appreciate at this time how much this impacts not just on his race but on all the other races coming in November.”

(c) Copyright Thomson Reuters 2024