A judge on Monday rejected Donald J. Trump’s argument that a recent Supreme Court ruling had nullified his criminal case in New York, upholding the former and future president’s felony conviction for falsifying records to cover up a sex scandal.
The judge’s ruling preserves, at least for now, the stain of Mr. Trump’s criminal conviction. And if it withstands Mr. Trump’s appeal, it will make him the first felon to serve as president.
The ruling, which addressed the Supreme Court’s decision to grant presidents broad immunity for their official actions, thwarted only the first of several legal maneuvers Mr. Trump has concocted to clear his record of 34 felonies before returning to the White House.
Prosecutors had argued that the Supreme Court’s decision had “no bearing on this prosecution,” noting that Mr. Trump was convicted of orchestrating a scheme involving a personal and political crisis that predated his presidency.
But Mr. Trump’s lawyers seized on a particularly contentious portion of the high court’s ruling, which prohibited prosecutors from introducing evidence involving a president’s official acts even in a case about private misconduct. They argued that testimony from former White House employees had contaminated the verdict.
In the first significant interpretation of that polarizing opinion, the New York judge who oversaw the trial sided with prosecutors, concluding that the testimony centered on Mr. Trump’s unofficial conduct.
“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,” the judge, Juan M. Merchan, wrote in a 41-page decision.
And even if the evidence was “admitted in error, such error was harmless,” he added, noting the “overwhelming evidence of guilt” introduced at trial.
A spokesman for Mr. Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A spokeswoman for the district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, declined to comment.
Justice Merchan will not have the final say on the immunity issue, and Mr. Trump can now appeal his ruling. Even if Mr. Trump loses in New York’s appellate courts, he can ultimately take the matter to a friendlier venue: the Supreme Court, which has adopted an expansive view of presidential power and where the 6-to-3 conservative majority includes three justices he appointed during his first term.
And the matter of immunity is hardly Mr. Trump’s only path to unwinding his New York conviction. He has also sought to leverage his electoral victory to throw out the case, citing a 1963 law that enshrined the importance of a smooth transition into the presidency, and a longstanding Justice Department policy that states a sitting president cannot face federal criminal prosecution.
Even though the New York case was brought by state prosecutors and has already resulted in a conviction, Mr. Trump’s lawyers have argued that keeping it alive would impose “unconstitutional impediments to President Trump’s ability to govern.”
The Manhattan district attorney’s office, which prosecuted Mr. Trump, has opposed any effort to overturn the jury’s verdict, saying that would amount to an “extreme remedy.”
Instead, the prosecutors have signaled a willingness to freeze the case for four years while Mr. Trump holds office, a move that would indefinitely postpone his sentencing.
“This type of time-limited accommodation is far more appropriate than the sweeping relief that defendant requests here, which would render the indictment and jury verdict in this case a nullity and eliminate his accountability for the crimes that a jury of his peers found he committed by proof beyond a reasonable doubt,” the prosecutors wrote in a recent court filing.
Justice Merchan, who could rule as soon as this week on Mr. Trump’s election-related dismissal bid, has already paused the sentencing several times. Mr. Trump faces up to four years in prison, but he is unlikely to receive more than a few weeks or months behind bars in New York, according to legal experts.
Mr. Trump cannot be sent to jail while he is president, and the judge can choose to hold off on sentencing him until after his term ends. If Justice Merchan decides instead to address the matter now, he could choose to uphold the conviction but impose no jail time or any other punishment.
If Mr. Trump manages to avoid all punishment whatsoever in his only criminal case to make it to trial, it would complete a stunning turnabout from earlier this year, when he faced four indictments in four different jurisdictions.
The federal special counsel who brought two of those cases, one in Washington, D.C., and the other in Florida, recently shut down both of them, bowing to the Justice Department’s policy against prosecuting sitting presidents federally.
In Georgia, where a local prosecutor accused Mr. Trump of trying to subvert the state’s 2020 election results, Mr. Trump has already managed to delay the case indefinitely.
The Supreme Court’s immunity decision stems from the special counsel’s case in Washington, where Mr. Trump is accused of plotting to overturn his 2020 election loss.
The 6-3 ruling, which was decided along partisan lines, held that a former president was “entitled to at least presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts.”
Within hours of the decision’s landing, Mr. Trump’s lawyers sought to link it to the Manhattan case, arguing that it invalidated the conviction.
At first blush, the two seem unrelated.
In May, a jury of 12 New Yorkers found Mr. Trump guilty of all 34 counts of falsifying business records related to covering up a porn star’s account of a sexual encounter with him, which threatened to derail his 2016 presidential campaign.
To bury the story, Mr. Trump’s former fixer, Michael D. Cohen brokered a $130,000 hush-money deal with the porn star, Stormy Daniels. Mr. Trump eventually repaid Mr. Cohen, who testified that his former boss orchestrated a scheme to falsify records and hide the true purpose of the reimbursement.
Mr. Trump’s lawyers argued that, in light of the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling, prosecutors had improperly relied on evidence that involved “official communications” during his first term in the White House, including tweets he posted as president.
But many of those statements were public, the prosecutors noted, and the Supreme Court specifically exempted public information from the prohibition on using official acts as evidence.
Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts concluded that a “prosecutor may point to the public record” to illustrate an argument, even if it involves official acts.
In his ruling on Monday, Justice Merchan rejected the defense’s effort to portray the tweets as official acts, concluding that they “do not constitute the type of conduct” the Supreme Court intended to protect.
“To find otherwise would effectively mean that every statement ever uttered (or posted on social media) by a sitting president, whether personal or official, in his or her own interests or that of the country, would be protected by absolute immunity,” Justice Merchan wrote.
Still, Mr. Trump mounted a somewhat stronger argument that the Supreme Court’s ruling now prohibits some of the testimony that was given at trial. His lawyers cited the testimony of two of Mr. Trump’s former White House employees, his communications director Hope Hicks and Madeleine Westerhout, a director of Oval Office operations.
In one crucial portion of her testimony, Ms. Hicks told the jury about a discussion she had with Mr. Trump in the White House after the hush-money deal with Ms. Daniels had come to light. Ms. Hicks said that after The Wall Street Journal broke the story, she spoke with Mr. Trump about “how to respond.”
Yet prosecutors argued that the discussions between Ms. Hicks and Mr. Trump “related solely to unofficial conduct” about the sex scandal. The prosecutors invoked the Supreme Court ruling to help their cause, noting that Justice Roberts had written that a president can speak “in an unofficial capacity,” and that not every act a president takes is official, a holding that Justice Merchan highlighted in his ruling on Monday.
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