Ex-prosecutor reveals Trump's 'longshot' new ploy to overturn hush money conviction
A former federal prosecutor believes former President Donald Trump's latest effort to overturn his 34-count felony conviction in Manhattan — leveraging his partial win at the Supreme Court that presidents have immunity for official acts — has a sliver of a shot, but won't likely succeed.
That case, which found Trump guilty of falsifying business records for buying adult film star Stormy Daniels' silence, looks all but certain now to be the only one of Trump's four criminal cases to be decided before the election, with sentencing set for later this month. An appeal could drag the matter out.
"On this new reporting tonight of how this decision here in Washington has already extended and having its impact felt in New York, you predicted this earlier when you were hearing that this was going to happen, within an hour of the Supreme Court decision coming down," CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins told former federal prosecutor Elie Honig on Monday night.
"You can see the dominoes that were going to fall," said Honig. "I think this gives Donald Trump's team a shot — a long shot, but a shot — to try to overturn the hush money case."
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"I think you've just got some interesting details ... as to how they're going to argue it," he continued. "The Supreme Court today defined 'official acts' very broadly. Broader than I even expected them to. And so Trump's team is going to say some of the communications, not many, but a bit of the evidence used against Donald Trump in the hush money trial happened in early 2017 when he was president, communications with White House officials. I'm not sure that just using the official Twitter account is enough to get something over the line, but they're going to have an argument."
Ultimately, he said he thinks Judge Juan Merchan will be "skeptical of that argument."
"If I had to guess, I would guess he denies it," said Honig. "However, this gives Donald Trump another arrow in the quiver for when he goes up onto appeal and could end up right back in the same place we got our ruling from today."
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