In his ongoing effort to overturn his 34 felony convictions, Donald Trump is going to have to follow the usual course of any criminal defendant prosecuted in the state of New York.
That’s the bottom line of a ruling issued on Friday by Senior U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein, who rejected Trump’s latest attempt to transfer his appeal to federal court.
During a conversation on Substack Live, Glenn Kirschner and I demystified the 35-page opinion and order, which followed both arcane and important legal issues. Among them, the most ominous for Trump were Hellerstein’s findings on the impact of the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity decision.
In Trump v. United States, the Roberts Court created a doctrine of presidential immunity — and decided that it included a new rule prohibiting the use of evidence stemming from official acts against a former president. Judge Hellerstein said that such a rule didn’t apply to a fraud prosecution for Trump covering up hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels to keep the voting public in the dark before the 2016 presidential election.
“The People’s prosecution arises from President Trump’s private conduct surrounding the reimbursement of hush money payments to an adult film star,” Hellerstein wrote. “That conduct, and the challenged evidence, bears no substantive relation to his position in federal office. To consider these facts to be ‘relating to’ a federal office would give the words a definition that is “so broad that it is meaningless.”
Later in the conversation, we discussed the Trump-installed Kennedy Center Board’s sudden decision to hold off on his renovation plan until Oct. 8 — a seeming recognition that it would face a temporary restraining order if it failed to do so.
Watch the video in full at the top of this newsletter.
