Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is opposing Donald Trump’s motion to have his hush money case dismissed due to his election as president, telling Judge Juan Merchan that “[p]resident-elect immunity does not exist” and that the case can instead be put on hold while Trump is in office.
“At most, defendant should receive temporary accommodations during his presidency to prevent this criminal case from meaningfully interfering with his official decision-making,” Bragg’s office wrote to Merchan in a response dated Monday that was made public Tuesday. Trump’s request for dismissal, Bragg wrote, goes “well beyond what is necessary to protect the presidency and would subvert the compelling public interest in preserving the jury’s unanimous verdict and upholding the rule of law.”
Trump’s motion cited a long list of complaints against various actors in the legal system and said dismissal is required due to presidential immunity, federal law regarding the presidential transition, and the Constitution’s supremacy clause. In May, a Manhattan jury found Trump guilty of falsifying business records for covering up a hush money scheme in connection with the 2016 presidential election.
Even if Merchan rejects this latest motion, which arose after Trump’s electoral victory last month, there’s still another pending motion standing in the way of sentencing. That’s the motion that Trump already had pending to overturn his guilty verdicts or dismiss the case, based on the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling. And his lawyers have signaled that they would immediately appeal any adverse action by Merchan before sentencing, so even if the judge rules against Trump on both motions, when Trump would be sentenced is still unclear.
All of this raises the question of whether the case might be paused while Trump is in office, something that Trump’s lawyers have said they’re opposed to but Bragg’s office has floated as a possibility. Presidents can’t pardon state cases away or get their attorney general to dismiss them like federal ones, which raises the novel issue for the state cases in New York and Georgia, with Trump also trying to get the latter dismissed before he takes office. Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for expert analysis on the top legal stories of the week, including updates from the Supreme Court and developments in Donald Trump’s legal cases.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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