Donald Trump judge rejects bid to toss hush money conviction before entering White House
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Donald Trump will enter the White House a convicted criminal after a judge refused to throw out his porn star hush money guilty verdict. The president-elect’s legal team had moved to have the case dismissed due to the US Supreme Court’s recent ruling on presidential immunity. But trial judge Juan Merchan refused to quash the conviction, saying Trump paid off adult actress Stormy Daniels, who claims she bedded the businessman before he became US leader.
In May, a New York jury convicted him of 34 counts of falsifying business records related to a $130,000 (£102,400) payment in 2016. Trump denies wrongdoing. The allegations involved a scheme to hide the payout to Daniels during the final days of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign to keep her from publicising - and keep voters from hearing - her claim of a sexual encounter with the married then-businessman years earlier.
He says nothing sexual happened between them. A month after the verdict, the Supreme Court ruled that ex-presidents can’t be prosecuted for official acts - things they did in the course of running the country - and that prosecutors can’t cite those actions to bolster a case centred on purely personal, unofficial conduct.
Trump’s lawyers then cited the Supreme Court opinion to argue that the hush money jury got some improper evidence, such as Trump’s presidential financial disclosure form, testimony from some White House aides and social media posts made while he was in office.
In his ruling, Merchan denied the bulk of Trump’s claims that some of the prosecutors’ evidence related to official acts and implicated immunity protections. The judge said that even if he found that some evidence related to official conduct, he’d still conclude that prosecutors’ decision to use “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.”.
