By LARRY NEUMEISTER, Associated Press
NEW YORK (AP) — President Donald Trump’s lawyers have asked a New York state appeals court to toss out his hush money criminal conviction, saying federal law preempts state law and there was no intent to commit a crime.
The lawyers filed their written arguments with the state’s mid-level appeals court just before midnight Monday.
In June, the lawyers asked a federal appeals court to move the case to federal court, where the Republican president can challenge the conviction on presidential immunity grounds. The appeals court has not yet ruled.
Trump was convicted in May 2024 of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to conceal a hush money payment to adult film actor Stormy Daniels, whose affair allegations threatened to upend his 2016 presidential campaign. Trump denies her claim and said he did nothing wrong. It was the only one of the four criminal cases against him to go to trial.
Trump was sentenced in January to what’s known as an unconditional discharge, leaving his conviction on the books but sparing him jail, probation, a fine or other punishment.
Appearing by video at his sentencing, Trump called the case a “political witch hunt,” “a weaponization of government” and “an embarrassment to New York.”
The Manhattan district attorney’s office, which prosecuted the case, will have a chance to respond to the appeals arguments in court papers. A message seeking comment was left with the office on Tuesday.
At trial, prosecutors said Trump mislabeled payments to his then-lawyer Michael Cohen as legal fees to conceal that he was actually reimbursing the $130,000 that Cohen paid Daniels to keep her quiet in the final weeks of Trump’s successful 2016 presidential run.
At the time, Daniels was considering going public with a claim that she and the married Trump had a 2006 sexual encounter that Trump has consistently denied.
In their arguments to the New York state appeals court, Trump’s lawyers wrote that the prosecution of Trump was “the most politically charged prosecution in our Nation’s history.”
They said Trump was the victim of a Democrat district attorney in Manhattan who “concocted a purported felony by stacking time-barred misdemeanors under a convoluted legal theory” during a contentious presidential election in which Trump was the leading Republican candidate.
They wrote that federal law preempts the “misdemeanor-turned-felony charges” because the charges rely on an alleged violation of federal campaign regulations that states cannot and have never enforced.
They said the trial was also spoiled when prosecutors introduced official presidential acts that the Supreme Court has made clear cannot be used as evidence against a U.S. president.
“Beyond these fatal flaws, the evidence was clearly insufficient to convict,” the lawyers wrote.
The lawyers also attacked the conviction on the grounds that “pure, evidence-free speculation” was behind the effort by prosecutors to persuade jurors that Trump was thinking about the 2020 election when he allegedly decided to reimburse Cohen.
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