Donald Trump loses bid to toss ‘hush money’ conviction after immunity ruling

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Donald Trump has lost a bid to overturn his conviction in a New York “hush money” criminal case in the wake of a US Supreme Court decision that grants broad immunity for presidential actions.

The decision by a judge on Monday comes as Trump prepares to re-enter the White House in January, the first former president to ever be convicted of a felony. All four criminal cases brought against him since his first term have either been dismissed, put on hold or otherwise delayed.

Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts earlier this year in a Manhattan court of falsifying business records in connection with what prosecutors alleged was a scheme to buy the silence of a porn actor over an affair. His sentencing has been indefinitely postponed, however, after he won another four-year term in November’s election. 

The Supreme Court ruled in July that presidents are protected from criminal prosecution over a wide range of actions they take while in office. 

Trump’s lawyers — two of whom he has nominated for top positions in the Department of Justice — had argued that the immunity decision should apply to the hush money case since it implicated some actions he took while in office, including social media posts. Manhattan prosecutors opposed those efforts, saying the case primarily dealt with Trump’s unofficial actions.

“[E]ven if this court were to deem all of the contested evidence . . . as official conduct falling within the outer perimeter of defendant’s presidential authority, it would still find that the people’s use of these acts as evidence of the decidedly personal acts of falsifying business records poses no danger of intrusion on the authority and function of the executive branch,” Justice Juan Merchan wrote in the decision.

Trump is likely to appeal against the decision, and has decried the criminal cases brought against him as politically motivated witch hunts. In addition to the Manhattan case, he was indicted in two federal cases by DoJ special counsel Jack Smith — one over alleged interference in the 2020 election, and another over classified documents found at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate — and another by the Fulton county district attorney’s office over the 2020 election results in Georgia.

Smith dropped both federal cases after the 2024 election, citing a DoJ policy that generally prohibits prosecutions of sitting presidents, while the Georgia case remains mired in appeals.