Former President Donald Trump can’t outrun his Sept. 18 “hush money” trial sentencing despite the Supreme Court’s stunning immunity ruling last week, former New York judges and prosecutors told Business Insider.
The Supreme Court last Monday ruled 6-3 that Trump is “immune from prosecution for official acts taken while in office, but not for private conduct,” the Washington Post reports. That decision put Trump’s pending criminal sentencing in peril after a Manhattan jury last month unanimously convicted the former president on 34 felony counts related to falsifying documents.
As Business Insider reports, “[E]ven if Trump's trial judge, New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan, finds that presidential immunity retroactively invalidates some evidence used at trial, he'll likely also find that this amounts to ‘harmless error.’ No harm, no foul — meaning that even if you removed the challenged evidence, there would still be overwhelming proof of Trump's guilt.”
READ MORE: 'I have to hit pause here': J.D. Vance flips out on NBC host as she fact-checks him
John Moscow, a former Manhattan financial crimes prosecutor, told Business Insider he believes “the judge will find that [Trump] would have been convicted regardless.”
Moscow explained “harmless error” as a doctrine that “means you're saying that removing this evidence from the trial wouldn't change the verdict.”
The Hill reports Trump’s lawyer aren’t claiming the former president is immune “from the actual 34 counts of falsifying business records he faced," but instead have “zeroed in on trial evidence used to prove those counts.”
“The former president contends that the jury’s verdict must be tossed out because some evidence shown to jurors is now inadmissible under the Supreme Court’s new test,” The Hill reports....
