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A federal judge in New York has again blocked the president from trying to move the hush money case that saw him convicted of 34 counts of falsifying business records to federal court.
“President Trump must show that ‘he acted diligently and without undue delay to remove the case based on’ new grounds, here, principally the issuance of the United States Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. United States, in order to ‘show good cause for the untimely filing at issue,’” U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein wrote, adding that the president had failed to do so.
Stormy Daniels; Michael Cohen AP file
The judge found Trump had waited too long after the high court’s ruling on presidential immunity to try to move the case, and that he only attempted to do so after it became clear the state court was going to reject his immunity arguments.
Trump had pleaded not guilty to the criminal charges and is appealing his conviction.
Hellerstein, who’d rejected Trump’s earlier attempts to move the case, also ripped the argument that the trial testimony of his former White House aides Hope Hicks and Madeleine Westerhout and former personal lawyer Michael Cohen infringed on presidential immunity.
“They do not,” Hellerstein wrote. “Paying hush money to an adult film star or engaging in a cover-up of an embarrassment are not subsumed in presidential immunity.”
“There is no way that discussions regarding hush money payments to cover up the President’s relations with Stormy Daniels could be an official act,” Hellerstein ruled, referring to the adult film actor, who alleged an affair with Trump years earlier. “An affair, or a cover-up of an affair, is not within the ’outer perimeter’ of the President’s official responsibilities,” .
Trump has repeatedly denied the affair allegation.
The president’s attorneys also argued in court that four of Trump’s online posts should be considered an official act.
But the judge wrote that the tweets “discussed Cohen’s role as the President’s personal attorney and stated that the matter with Stormy Daniels was ‘a private contract’ between Cohen and Daniels,” meaning that each was “an unofficial communication.”
“Trump used his personal Twitter account, where he regularly communicated both official and unofficial statements,” he wrote.
Hellerstein added the prosecution arose from private conduct, surrounding the reimbursement of hush money payments to the adult film star.
“That conduct, and the challenged evidence, bears no substantive relation to his position in federal office,” he wrote. “To consider these facts to be ’relating to’ a federal office would give the words a definition that is ‘so broad that it is meaningless.'”
Attorneys for the president filed a notice that he was appealing Hellerstein’s order shortly after it was handed down.