President-elect Donald Trump is seeking the “immediate dismissal” of the New York hush money case, in which a jury found him guilty of 34 felony counts of business falsification, citing the “uniquely destabilizing” effects of sentencing an incoming president.
“As DA Bragg engages in his own election campaign, [the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office] appears to not yet be ready to dismiss this politically-motivated and fatally flawed case, which is what is mandated by the law and will happen as justice takes its course,” lawyers for Trump wrote in a letter to Judge Juan Merchan on Wednesday.
The notice provided to the judge previews Trump’s arguments for his official motion to dismiss, and defense attorneys have asked for a Dec. 20 to file their motion seeking immediate dismissal.
Trump’s response comes one day after Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg informed Merchan that he does not oppose a stay in post-trial procedures, indicating his office would not oppose a delay to his sentencing on Nov. 26. However, Bragg’s office made clear they do not believe the case should be dismissed and even floated the option of sentencing Trump after his second term concludes in 2029.
Prosecutors with Bragg’s office have asked Merchan to set a Dec. 9 filing deadline for their response seeking to sustain the jury’s guilty verdict against Trump.
Trump’s lawyers pointed to special counsel Jack Smith’s recent plans to step down and dismiss the two federal criminal indictments against Trump as grounds that the state criminal case, in which Trump was accused of falsifying business records to conceal a $130,000 hush money payment made to porn star Stormy Daniels in the run-up to his 2016 presidential election, should also be tossed out.
The “DOJ is reportedly preparing to dismiss the federal cases against President Trump, and will report its final decision to federal courts on December 2, 2024. As in those cases, dismissal is necessary here,” Trump’s attorneys wrote.
Trump pleaded not guilty to the charges and denied Daniels’s accusations that an affair occurred between them.
Merchan has still not wiped the Nov. 26 sentencing date from the schedule, though because the parties seek December deadlines to file motions on Trump’s dismissal request, no sentencing can take place until those matters can be resolved.
David Gelman, a Trump campaign legal surrogate, told the Washington Examiner that the Supreme Court’s July 1 decision, which found former presidents are immune from prosecution for official acts they took while in office, should apply to a large amount of evidence prosecutors relied on to secure a jury’s conviction of Trump in May.
Defense attorneys have said any testimony by witnesses involved with Trump after he assumed office in 2017 could fall under the umbrella of impermissible evidence, noting that context would involve “official acts” that the Supreme Court said are largely shielded from criminal prosecution. Gelman pointed to testimony from former Trump adviser Hope Hicks and star trial witness Michael Cohen, an ex-lawyer of Trump, as examples that should not pass the test the Supreme Court set in Trump v. United States earlier this year.
“We all knew the reason that this was brought to begin with. It was to keep President Trump off the campaign trail. But it backfired tremendously,” Gelman said, adding, “The American people have spoken.”
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Trump tried and failed on several occasions to dismiss the case before the trial concluded, including efforts to remove the case to federal court in search of a more favorable venue, given Manhattan’s Democratic-leaning demographics.
The president-elect even made three separate attempts to recuse Merchan, arguing he could not adjudicate the trial without bias. The defense cited the judge’s daughter, Loren Merchan, who worked for a political consulting group that works on behalf of numerous Democrats, including Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA). Merchan denied those efforts to dismiss the case as well.
