CNN senior legal analyst Elie Honig suggested Monday that Judge Juan Merchan might vacate President-elect Donald Trump’s guilty verdict in his New York case due to the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity ruling.
A jury convicted Trump in May on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, but Merchan is set to rule Tuesday on a motion to overturn the verdict, according to The Associated Press. Honig, on “CNN News Central,” noted that while “it is rare to see a verdict thrown out,” Merchan may choose to dismiss it based on certain evidence in Trump’s trial potentially breaching the ruling, which the Supreme Court issued after the verdict.
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“Judge Merchan … is going to issue his ruling on the immunity case. Now, you may be thinking, how could there be immunity? This all related to payments made before Donald Trump was president the first time in 2016,” Honig said. “The problem, though, from the prosecutor’s point of view, is some of the evidence that they introduced at trial did relate to conversations Trump had while in the White House. Hope Hicks was a key witness about conversations she had when she was communications director.”
“The immunity decision came out after that trial, but it’s still the law of the land. And Trump’s team is now saying, ‘That evidence should not have been included, therefore I‘m entitled to a new trial.’ So we don’t know what Judge Merchan is going to do,” he continued. “He could say, ‘Yes, that evidence should not have been let in, verdict is vacated.’ I mean, it is rare — to sort of keep perspective — it is rare to see a verdict thrown out, but it happens. Or he could rule that that evidence was too small a part of the total puzzle and doesn’t necessitate a brand new verdict. But that’s going to be a huge moment tomorrow.”
However, noted attorney Alan Dershowitz said in July that Merchan would “do everything in his power” to uphold Trump’s conviction.
With Trump’s election victory, two federal cases against him will be dropped and his state cases most likely will be too, though there’s a chance ambitious local prosecutors could prolong the battle, the Daily Caller News Foundation reported on Wednesday. Yet Trump’s risk of prison time has evaporated, even as Merchan is slated to sentence him on Nov. 26.
Even if Merchan sentences Trump to prison, there’s no chance the president-elect could serve time because “a state cannot interfere with a President’s ability to do his job, which he could not do from prison, and the Secret Service would not be able to guarantee his safety,” John Malcolm, vice president for the Heritage Foundation’s Institute for Constitutional Government and former deputy assistant attorney general in the DOJ’s Criminal Division, told the DCNF.
Trump’s sentencing was originally set for just days before the July Republican National Convention, but the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity ruling prompted months of delays.
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