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Trump requests to move “hush money” case to federal court
Former President Donald Trump asked a federal court late Thursday to intervene in his New York “hush money” criminal case, seeking a pathway to overturn his felony conviction and indefinitely delay his sentencing next month.
Lawyers for the current Republican nominee asked the federal court in Manhattan to seize the case from the state court where it was tried, arguing that the historic prosecution violated his constitutional rights and ran afoul of the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent presidential immunity ruling.
Trump’s lawyers, who failed last year in a pretrial bid to get the case shifted to federal court, said moving it now will give him an “unbiased forum, free from local hostilities” to address those issues. In state court, they said, Trump has been the victim of “bias, conflicts of interest, and appearances of impropriety.”
If the case is moved to federal court, Trump’s lawyers said they will then seek to have the verdict overturned and the case dismissed on immunity grounds.
If the case remains in state court and Trump’s sentencing proceeds as scheduled on Sept. 18 — about seven weeks before Election Day — it would be election interference, his lawyers said, raising the specter that Trump could be sent to jail just as early voting is getting under way.
Trump’s request Thursday is poised to be decided by the same Manhattan federal judge who rejected his earlier bid to move the case — a decision that cleared the way for his trial in state court.
“The ongoing proceedings will continue to cause direct and irreparable harm to President Trump — the leading candidate in the 2024 Presidential election — and voters located far beyond Manhattan,” Trump lawyers Todd Blanche and Emil Bove wrote in a 64-page U.S. District Court filing.
The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, which prosecuted Trump’s case and fought his previous effort to move the case out of state court, declined to comment. A message seeking comment was left with a spokesperson for New York’s state court system.
Trump was convicted in May of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records related to conceal a $130,000 hush money payment to porn actor Stormy Daniels, whose affair allegations threatened to disrupt his 2016 presidential run.
Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen paid Daniels and was later reimbursed by Trump, whose company logged the reimbursements as legal expenses. Trump maintains that the stories were false, that reimbursements were for legal work and logged correctly, and that the case against him was part of a politically motivated “witch hunt” aimed at damaging his current presidential campaign.
Falsifying business records is punishable by up to four years behind bars. Other potential sentences include probation or a fine.
Even if Trump’s case isn’t moved to federal court, ensuing legal wrangling could force his sentencing to be delayed, giving him a critical reprieve as he navigates the aftermath of his criminal conviction and the homestretch of his White House run. Trump is the first ex-president convicted of a crime.
Separately, the trial judge, Juan M. Merchan, is weighing Trump’s requests to postpone sentencing until after Election Day, Nov. 5, and to overturn the verdict and dismiss the case in the wake of the Supreme Court’s immunity decision.
The high court’s July 1 ruling reins in prosecutions of ex-presidents for official acts and restricts prosecutors in pointing to official acts as evidence that a president’s unofficial actions were illegal.
Trump’s lawyers have argued that prosecutors rushed to trial instead of waiting for the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity decision, and that the trial was “tainted” by evidence that should not have been allowed under the ruling, such as former White House staffers describing how he reacted to news coverage of the hush money deal and tweets he sent while president in 2018.
Trump’s lawyers had previously invoked presidential immunity in a failed bid last year to get the hush money case moved from state court to federal court.
U.S. District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein rejected Trump’s claim that allegations in the hush money indictment involved official duties, writing in July 2023, “The evidence overwhelmingly suggests that the matter was a purely a personal item of the president — a cover-up of an embarrassing event.”
“Hush money paid to an adult film star is not related to a president’s official acts. It does not reflect in any way the color of the president’s official duties,” Hellerstein added.
Trump appealed the ruling, but abandoned that fight just before a November 2023 deadline to file paperwork stating why he felt Hellerstein should be overturned.
Trump’s lawyers argued in Thursday’s filing that circumstances had changed since they initially attempted to get the case moved to federal court. Among other things, they said state prosecutors had misled the court by saying earlier that the trial wouldn’t involve Trump’s official duties or actions as president.
There was also testimony, they said, from Cohen about Trump’s potential use of pardon power and his response to various investigations into his conduct. All that testimony, they wrote, had to do with Trump’s actions as president.
“President Trump is entitled to a federal forum for his Presidential immunity defense based on the Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. United States,” Blanche and Bove wrote. “After this case is properly removed, President Trump will establish that the charges must be dismissed.”
Blanche and Bove also reiterated their claims that Merchan has treated Trump unfairly because Merchan’s daughter is a Democratic political consultant, and they argued that the judge is wrongly muzzling Trump with a gag order he kept in place after the verdict.
Merchan this month rejected Trump’s latest request that he step aside from the case, saying Trump’s demand was a rehash “rife with inaccuracies and unsubstantiated claims” about his ability to remain impartial. A state appeals court recently upheld the gag order.
Merchan “is poised to incarcerate President Trump in the final weeks of the campaign, and he has maintained an unwarranted and unconstitutional prior restraint on President Trump’s ability to respond to political attacks by criticizing the New York County proceedings,” Blanche and Bove said.
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Pearl Jam is one of the world’s biggest, well-respected rock groups. Now, in a rare extensive interview with correspondent Anthony Mason, Eddie Vedder and bass player Jeff Ament open up about the band’s founding, being together for nearly 35 years, their latest album, and more for “CBS Sunday Morning,” to be broadcast Sunday, September 22 on CBS and streamed on Paramount+.
Mason caught up with Pearl Jam while on tour for a revealing, personal look, in which Vedder and Ament talk about their childhoods, making music together, their dedicated fan base, being on tour, growing older, and their friendship.
CBS News
Watch the excerpt in the video player above featuring Vedder talking about writing lyrics while surfing to an instrumental tape sent to him by a group of Seattle musicians, and bassist Jeff Ament’s reaction when he heard them:
EDDIE VEDDER: I was doing those midnight shifts security. So, when I went for a surf in the morning … I remember it being super foggy and one of those days where you think, ‘Maybe I won’t go out.’ … But I had the music in my head, the instrumental, and just kind of wrote it. And then, I was still wet when I hit ‘record.’
ANTHONY MASON: When you heard what he sent back, what did you think?
JEFF AMENT: I listened to it. And then I remember I left and went and got a coffee, and then I came back, and I listened to it again. … And then I remember calling Stone [Gossard] and I said, ‘You need to come over here right now.’
Ament, and guitarists Stone Gossard, and Mike McCready flew Vedder up to Seattle to audition.
VEDDER: It was just, I was like, you felt it. Like, you were like, ‘Oh, this is what it is. Like, this is heaven.'”
You can stream Pearl Jam’s latest album, “Dark Matter,” by clicking on the embed below (Free Spotify registration required to hear the tracks in full):
The Emmy Award-winning “Sunday Morning” is broadcast Sundays on CBS beginning at 9 a.m. ET. “Sunday Morning” also streams on the CBS News app [beginning at 11 a.m. ET] and on Paramount+, and is available on cbs.com and cbsnews.com.
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Stocks on Wall Street soared Thursday a day after the Federal Reserve slashed its benchmark interest rate by 0.50 percentage points, with investors cheering the central bank’s move to head off a slowdown in U.S. economic growth.
The Dow Jones Industrial Averages jumped 479 points, or 1.1%, as of 10:02 a.m. Eastern time to 41,982. The S&P 500 climbed 87 points, or 1.6%, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq jumped 2.3%.
“Stocks are exploding higher as markets absorb the Fed’s outsized rate cut,” Adam Crisafulli of Vital Knowledge said in a note to investors.
The half-point move signals that the Fed is acting aggressively to keep the U.S. economy from stalling, given that historically most rate cuts are 0.25 percentage points. The rate cut will provide some relief to U.S. consumers struggling with high borrowing rates impacting credit cards, mortgages and auto loans.
Stocks rose modestly immediately after the Fed’s announcement that it was lowering rates for the first time since March 2020. But with a day to digest the move, which included new data from the central bank forecasting solid economic growth in 2025, investors seemed buoyed in morning trade.
“I don’t see anything in the economy right now that suggests that the likelihood of a downturn is elevated — you see growth at a solid rate, you see inflation coming down and a labor market that is still at very solid levels,” Fed Chair Jerome Powell said in a press conference on Wednesday to discuss the rate cut.