Trump maintains that the president is immune from prosecution for official actions.
What we know about who the Trump Justice Department is targeting
President Donald Trump’s Justice Department recently indicted three people the president said he wanted prosecuted. Here’s what we know:
NEW YORK, Nov 6 (Reuters) – Donald Trump will have another chance to prove that his New York hush money criminal case belongs in federal court, a federal appeals court said on Thursday, giving the U.S. president another chance to try to expunge his conviction.
Trump has maintained that the president enjoys immunity from prosecution for official actions.
The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan said a federal judge should have looked more closely at whether a 2024 Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity should have excluded some evidence in President Trump’s criminal trial.
In May 2024, a Manhattan jury found Trump guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg accused Trump of trying to influence the 2016 presidential election by concealing $130,000 in hush money paid to porn actress Stormy Daniels, who claims she had a sexual relationship with Trump.
Prosecutors said the payments amounted to undisclosed excessive donations to the Trump campaign. Trump denied Daniels’ claims and defeated Democrat Hillary Clinton in the election.
The judge who oversaw the trial upheld the conviction, sparing Trump from jail time and fines, but he said the unusually light sentence would help ensure confirmation. Trump was sentenced just before his inauguration for a second term in the White House on January 20th.
Trump claims executive privilege
In seeking to have the case moved to federal court, President Trump said the Supreme Court’s finding that presidents have broad immunity from prosecution for acts of officialdom immunized him from prosecution as jurors heard evidence from his first term in the White House.
That included meeting with White House communications director Hope Hicks in the Oval Office in 2018, shortly after news of the hush money payments became public, to discuss what to tell the press. U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein in Manhattan rejected President Trump’s proposal to move the case to September 2024, saying it belongs in state court because it deals with Trump’s personal conduct.
Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Jeffrey Wall, told the 2nd Circuit in June that the criminal case essentially concerned federal campaign finance law, and that prosecutors’ emphasis on Mr. Hicks’ testimony showed that Mr. Trump’s official conduct was central to the case.
Stephen Wu, a lawyer in Mr. Bragg’s office, countered that the discussion of Trump’s “unofficial conduct” in the White House “does not transform a private conversation about private conduct into evidence of official conduct.”
