Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s (D) office told a state judge to reject former President Trump’s claims that his recent guilty verdict must be set aside following the Supreme Court’s landmark presidential immunity ruling.
Trump claims that prosecutors improperly introduced protected, official acts as evidence at his recent criminal trial, and the judge delayed his sentencing to September to consider the issue.
In a 69-page response made public on Thursday, Bragg’s office said none of the challenged evidence is protected, and even if it was, “any error was harmless in light of other overwhelming evidence of defendant’s guilt.”
“For all the pages that defendant devotes to his current motion, the evidence that he claims is affected by the Supreme Court’s ruling constitutes only a sliver of the mountains of testimony and documentary proof that the jury considered in finding him guilty of all 34 felony charges beyond a reasonable doubt,” Assistant District Attorney Matthew Colangelo wrote in the office’s response.
“Under these circumstances, there is no basis for disturbing the jury’s verdict, and defendant’s motion should be denied.”
In May, Trump became the first former U.S. president to be convicted of a crime when a New York jury found him guilty of lying in New York business records with an intent to unlawfully influence the 2016 presidential election.
Prosecutors say Trump unlawfully disguised payments to his then-fixer, Michael Cohen, as a legal retainer, when they were in fact reimbursement for him paying porn star Stormy Daniels $130,000 to stay quiet about an alleged affair with Trump. Trump denies any affair.
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