A federal judge on Friday denied President Trump’s request to move his 2024 felony conviction in Manhattan to federal court, blocking the president’s quickest path to overturning it.
In a 35-page ruling, the judge, Alvin K. Hellerstein of the Southern District of New York, said that Mr. Trump’s arguments were “neither new nor legally sufficient.” It was the third time that Judge Hellerstein had rejected efforts by Mr. Trump’s lawyers to move his criminal case to federal court.
“I reaffirm my former decision,” the judge wrote. “The president’s motion is denied.”
Robert J. Giuffra Jr., a lawyer for Mr. Trump, said he would appeal the decision. A spokeswoman for the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, declined to comment.
An appeal of Mr. Trump’s conviction, which made him the first felon president, would send the case back to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. If the court decides to review the case again, Mr. Trump may be able to take it to the Supreme Court, which has a conservative majority.
Mr. Trump is also continuing to appeal his case through state court, but that process could take years.
In March 2023, Mr. Trump was indicted in Manhattan state court and charged with 34 counts of falsifying business records related to a scheme to conceal a hush-money payment to the porn star Stormy Daniels before the 2016 presidential election.
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Mr. Bragg said that the payment had been made to hide information from American voters.
Shortly after the indictment, lawyers for Mr. Trump, who was not in office at the time, tried to move the case to federal court, arguing that he had a right to be tried there. The argument went before Judge Hellerstein, who presides in Federal District Court in Manhattan.
In the summer of 2023, he ruled against Mr. Trump, saying his lawyers had failed to show that the acts at the center of the charges — reimbursements made to Mr. Trump’s former fixer, Michael D. Cohen, for the hush-money payment — were related to the office of the presidency.
Mr. Trump was convicted in May 2024.
In July of that year, the Supreme Court found that presidents were entitled to presumptive immunity for official acts, raising the bar for any prosecution.
In September, Mr. Trump’s lawyers asked Judge Hellerstein to take a second look at the case, and he once again denied their efforts to move the case to federal court, saying that Mr. Trump’s claims to immunity from criminal prosecution were groundless. The hush-money payments, the judge wrote, “were private, unofficial acts, outside the bounds of executive authority.”
Mr. Trump then appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. The judges who handled the case, Raymond J. Lohier Jr., Susan L. Carney and Myrna Pérez, did not rule on the merit of the defense’s argument, but asked Judge Hellerstein to take another look at it.
They said that Judge Hellerstein should more closely examine if the evidence at trial touched on acts for which Mr. Trump should have been immune and to evaluate whether the law allowed for someone in the president’s position — a federal officer who is also a defendant — to move a case to federal court after a trial has been held and a judgment has been made.
Judge Hellerstein rejected those arguments. The evidence in question, which included trial testimony of witnesses like Mr. Cohen, he wrote, did not “infringe on presidential immunity.”
“Paying hush money to an adult film star or engaging in a cover-up of an embarrassment are not subsumed in presidential immunity,” he wrote.
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