Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg just filed “scorched earth opposition” against Donald Trump in a Wednesday motion in the former president’s criminal hush money case, according to legal analyst and attorney Glenn Kirschner on Friday.
In a case brought by Bragg, a New York jury in May found Trump guilty on 34 counts of falsifying business records relating to a hush money payment made to adult film star Stormy Daniels before the 2016 presidential election. Daniels alleged she had a sexual encounter with Trump in 2006, which he denies. Trump has maintained his innocence and says the case is politically motivated. His legal team has filed to appeal the case.
Earlier this month, Trump’s lawyers asked the judge to throw out his conviction based on the new Supreme Court decision, which ruled that presidents have broad immunity for official acts. It also ruled that official acts cannot be used as evidence if taking a case against a president for unofficial acts.
The Court’s ruling has impacted several criminal cases against Trump, with his lawyers in New York filing a motion in the criminal hush money case “saying it was all official presidential conduct. Therefore they urged the presiding Judge Juan Merchan to throw out the case in its entirety.”
However, the prosecution led by Bragg responded by filing a 69-page motion, calling to reject the “defendant’s belated and unpreserved effort to dismiss the indictment.”
Speaking on Brian Tyler Cohen’s YouTube channel on Friday, Kirschner, a former assistant U.S. attorney and frequent Trump critic, discussed the motion.
“Alvin Bragg’s prosecutors just filed the scorched earth opposition that said, ‘The Supreme Court said that the President might be above the law for official presidential acts,’ but guess what? Virtually nothing Donald Trump did when he was committing the crimes in New York for which he has been convicted, none of it involved official presidential conduct,” he said. “It was all private, it was all criminal violation of New York state law and none of it is impacted by the Supreme Court’s pretty horrific new ruling.”
Newsweek has reached out to Trump’s lawyer Todd Blanche and Bragg’s office via email for comment.
Kirschner previously pointed toward this in separate YouTube video on Friday when he said that although the hush money case is related to Trump’s 2016 election campaign, the misconduct the jury found happened before Trump took office.
He added that the prosecution “looked at that little crack of daylight that the Supreme Court left open, and they kicked the door wide open” by arguing what Trump did was not official presidential conduct.
This comes as Bragg wrote in the motion, “For one thing, [Trump] failed to preserve an objection on immunity grounds to most of the evidence that is the subject of his current motion.”
The district attorney added: “And, in any event, all of the evidence that he complains of either concerned wholly unofficial conduct or, at most, official conduct for which any presumption of immunity has been rebutted.”
Meanwhile, the verdict makes Trump the first former president convicted of felony crimes. The former president faces possible jail time, which, as Merchan noted, “if such is still necessary” after the Court’s decision, will be determined on September 18.
Uncommon Knowledge
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
