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- President Donald Trump’s Big Law lawyers are fighting to overturn his criminal conviction.
- Sullivan & Cromwell cochair Robert Giuffra asked to personally argue the appeal in court.
- They say Trump was protected by presidential immunity in the hush-money trial.
President Donald Trump’s attorneys have asked a New York appeals court to overturn his criminal conviction, arguing that he was protected by presidential immunity.
The appeal brief was filed Monday night by Trump’s attorneys at the elite Big Law firm Sullivan & Cromwell. The firm formally began representing Trump shortly after he was inaugurated for his second term, and it is not among the list of law firms the president has targeted during his administration.
Robert Giuffra, the cochair of the 146-year-old law firm, asked to personally present oral arguments before the court, the brief says.
“This case should never have seen the inside of a courtroom, let alone resulted in a conviction,” the brief says.
In May 2024, a jury found Trump guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business documents to cover up hush-money payments to adult entertainer Stormy Daniels ahead of the 2016 presidential election. The case was brought by the Manhattan district attorney’s office and overseen by New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan. (In the New York state court system, the trial court is called the Supreme Court and judges are called Justices.)
In the middle of the Manhattan criminal trial, the US Supreme Court in Washington, DC, heard arguments over whether presidential immunity shielded Trump in a separate criminal case over his actions during the January 6, 2021, riot.
The high court issued a sweeping ruling in July of last year, granting broad criminal immunity protections for presidents and forbidding evidence about a president’s “official acts” from being used in a trial.
The decision led to a pitched battle between Trump’s lawyers and the New York attorney general’s office over whether Merchan should have excluded certain evidence in the trial.
Merchan ultimately decided to uphold Trump’s criminal conviction. Shortly before Trump’s inauguration, the judge sentenced him to an unconditional discharge, which means he did not give him any punishment.
Monday night’s brief argues the Supreme Court ruling required an “automatic reversal of a conviction.”
“The jury improperly heard extensive testimony about at least four different kinds of official acts by President Trump,” Trump’s lawyers wrote.
The appeal brief also argues that Merchan wrongly instructed the jury about how to weigh the charges against Trump, that the Manhattan district attorney’s office improperly tried to enforce a federal law, and that the judge should have recused himself from the case because his daughter co-owned a marketing agency that provided work for Democrats.
“The Supreme Court’s historic decision on Immunity, the Federal and New York State Constitutions, and other established legal precedent mandate that this meritless hoax be immediately overturned and dismissed,” a spokesperson for Trump’s legal team told Business Insider. “President Trump will keep defeating Democrat weaponization at every turn as he focuses on his singular mission to Make America Great Again.”
A representative for the Manhattan district attorney’s office didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
The appeal was filed to the Appellate Division — First Department, which is the intermediate New York appeals court overseeing cases brought in Manhattan.
The court’s decision will almost certainly be appealed to the New York Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court. From there, it can be appealed to the US Supreme Court.
Trump’s Sullivan & Cromwell lawyers have also asked a federal appeals court to take on future appeals in the case, which could offer a faster path to the US Supreme Court.
The same team of Sullivan & Cromwell is also representing Trump in his appeal of a $500 million civil fraud judgment in a case brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James. In August, the appeals court upheld Trump’s liability in the case, but said the monetary amount was excessive.
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