Donald Trump's Lawyers Throw Spaghetti At The Courthouse Wall In New York Hush Money Case
Judges love that.
Donald Trump’s lawyers are tryin’ it in New York.
In a March 7 filing which hit the public docket Sunday night, they asked Justice Juan Merchan to postpone the false business records trial scheduled to begin March 25. The court should adjourn the case until the Supreme Court rules this summer on Trump’s claim of presidential immunity in the election interference case, they insist. Or barring that, they’d like the judge to ban any evidence from the time Trump was in the White House, also because IMMUNITY.
At first blush, this makes no bloody sense. Also on subsequent blushes. In fact, the motion is so offensively stupid that it’s unclear why his lawyers bothered to file it.
The Pornstar Payoff
In 2016, Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen paid pornstar Stormy Daniels $130,000 to keep quiet about a sexual encounter with Trump ten years earlier. To conceal the reimbursement, Cohen billed the Trump Organization for legal work never performed, tacking on an additional $290,000 to cover $50,000 he’d “paid” to rig an online poll, approximately $180,000 in tax liability, plus a $60,000 bonus.
In fact, Cohen stiffed the Liberty University tech dude who tried to ratf*ck the poll in 2014, fobbing him off with a WalMart bag containing $13,000 and a used boxing glove he claimed had been worn by a famous fighter. (True story!) But he still billed the Trump Org for the full $50,000.
Trump paid Cohen back through a series of $35,000 checks laundered through his revocable trust and the Trump Org, and those checks and invoices form the basis of the 34-count false business indictment filed by the Manhattan District Attorney in March of 2023.
So, Where Does the Presidential Immunity Come In?
NOWHERE. That’s ridiculous! Anyway Trump already tried to claim that the payments were official acts last year during his failed attempt to get the case transferred to federal court.
“The evidence overwhelmingly suggests that the matter was a purely a personal item of the President — a cover-up of an embarrassing event,” Judge Alvin Hellerstein wrote last July. “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.”
But if the question is, “What argument are Trump’s lawyers making here?” it goes something like this:
Donald Trump was president when he created those false business records and denied it in public. Maybe those public denials are official acts! And so it probably makes sense to wait until the Supreme Court rules on Trump’s magical perpetual presidential immunity claims this summer. Okay, Your Honor?
Or as Trump’s lawyers put it:
President Trump respectfully submits that an adjournment of the trial is appropriate to await further guidance from the Supreme Court, which should facilitate the appropriate application of the presidential immunity doctrine in this case to the evidence the People intend to offer at trial. Following the Supreme Court’s guidance, and consistent with the remand in Blassingame, the Court should hold a hearing outside the presence of the jury to identify and preclude documentary and testimonial official-acts evidence based on presidential immunity.
To be clear, the DC Circuit ruled in Blassingame v. Trump that Trump did not enjoy categorical immunity for any and all acts committed while in office. But the appellate judges said that Trump was entitled to make his case to the trial court that he was doing official president stuff when he dispatched his supporters to sack Congress, and so Trump is now spinning this as victory for his immunity claims.
Yes, this argument is really, really dumb. Luckily, Trump’s legal brain trust has a Plan B!
Unluckily, that plan is really dumb, too. (The plan. Also the brain trust. It works on multiple levels!)
Shitposter In Chief
Donald Trump’s second argument to Justice Merchan is that everything he tweeted or said while in office constitutes an official act, and thus must be excluded from evidence.
“The Court must preclude the People from offering evidence at trial of President Trump’s official acts as the Commander in Chief,” his lawyers intone somberly, adding that, “President Trump was President of the United States at the time of those actions in 2018. He made at least some of the 2018 statements at issue … in his official capacity as the nation’s Chief Executive.”
This argument rests on a sleight of hand so clumsy that would make a seven-year-old magician blush. In the election case, the Supreme Court granted certiorari on the narrow question of whether a former president can be criminally prosecuted for official acts. This is wholly irrelevant to whether those official acts can be used as evidence against him in an unrelated criminal prosecution — something no one has ever suggested and which is certainly not being considered by the Supreme Court.
Trump’s lawyers stake their claim on this deliberate category error and hope the judge won’t notice. The goal here is to keep Trump’s public statements, particularly the ones where he pressured Cohen to keep his mouth shut, far away from the jury.
“Most people will flip if the Government lets them out of trouble, even if . . . it means lying or making up stories,” he tweeted in 2018 as Cohen explored a deal to cooperate with Special Counsel Robert Mueller. “Sorry, I don’t see Michael doing that despite the horrible Witch Hunt and the dishonest media.”
This is what they call a bad fact. And the prosecutors noticed, writing in a recent motion that they intend to introduce evidence of Trump’s “pressure campaign” to keep Cohen quiet “because such evidence shows defendant’s consciousness of guilt and corroborates his intent.”
“[D]efendant has singled out two of the People’s witnesses—Michael Cohen and Stormy Daniels—with harassing comments on social media and in other public statements,” they went on. “The People will introduce evidence of these statements, and will elicit testimony from witnesses regarding the threats and harassment they received after defendant targeted them with these and other public attacks.”
In response Trump’s lawyers argue that the tweets were official acts — or could be official acts, who can say! — and so they must be excluded.
“[W]hile it is clear that the People intend to offer documents and testimony relating to the period in 2017 when President Trump was in office, they have not provided sufficiently specific notice of the nature and extent of that evidence to allow President Trump or the Court to distinguish between personal and official acts,” his attorneys argue.
Third Verse, Same As The First
This bad faith bullshit would be more newsworthy if Trump’s lawyers hadn’t run the same play a dozen times before. In fact, literally everything here is a retread of arguments made in other cases, and mostly rejected by multiple courts.
Trump’s immunity claim was dismissed by Judge Tanya Chutkan and dropkicked by the DC Circuit. But the Supreme Court granted cert and allowed him to freeze the election interference case, so now he’s hoping to use the same trick to knock the Florida documents case off the calendar.
How could presidential immunity apply to defying a subpoena and obstructing a federal investigation two years after leaving office. Dunno! But it worked in DC, so it’s definitely worth a try with Judge Cannon. And, hey, what the hell, might as well try it in New York, too!
In both Blassingame and the E. Jean Carroll defamation case, judges rejected Trump’s argument that each and every one of his public statements was part of his official duties.
And in the New York civil fraud trial, Trump tried and failed to convince the court that evidence of fraud must be excluded if that fraud was committed outside the statute of limitations.
“As I stated yesterday, the statute of limitations bars claims, not evidence,” Justice Arthur Engoron sighed in court after Trump crowed to reporters that “the judge essentially conceded that the statute of limitations, that we won at the court of appeals” meant that “80 percent of the case is over.”
So, How’d That One Go Over?
How did Justice Merchan respond to a motion to continue the trial less than two weeks before jury selection?
Well, how do you think?
Trial on this matter is scheduled to commence on March 25, 2024. Although the deadline for motions in limine was February 22, 2024, Defendant yesterday, filed a substantive motion seeking among other things, an adjournment on the grounds of presidential immunity. Defendant does not explain the reason for the late filing, a mere two and a half weeks before jury selection is set to begin.
The judge did not issue an immediate ruling, but he did tell Trump’s lawyers to knock it off, instructing the parties ask the court to sign a permission slip before they put any more surprise motions on the public docket.
In the meantime, yesterday was the deadline for Trump to inform the court whether he intends to assert an “advice of counsel” defense — essentially a claim that he was following his lawyers’ advice and thus didn’t have the requisite mens rea to break the law. An advice of counsel defense requires the defendant to waive attorney client privilege, since the attorney’s communications are critical evidence. But in a bizarre, three-page filing, Trump’s lawyers said that they were asserting advice of counsel, and also not waiving privilege.
At the outset, we emphasize that there is a marked difference between the commonly referred to “advice-of-counsel” defense and the defense that President Trump expects to raise at trial—part of which will be that President Trump lacked the requisite intent to commit the conduct charged in the Indictment because of his awareness that various lawyers were involved in the underlying conduct giving rise to the charges.
That is not a thing. But it’s never stopped Trump or his lawyers before, so here we are.
I can’t remember who pointed out that—since the orange would be dictator and his drooling lackeys spam the courts with the same frothing nonsense in multiple cases and jurisdictions in their ongoing effort to gum up the works long enough to try to get their asset back in office to misuse its powers again to evade justice—that the courts in multiple cases and jurisdictions are now leaning on each others decisions to speed along saying to them nice try fuck off...
I would like to move—this notion obviously being at least as reasonably based on the law and precedent as any of Team Fascist Tangerine’s—that said courts also band together and bulk order some stamps that just say ‘dismissed’ (or possibly ‘nice try fuck off’) and use those to further speed cutting through this crap. Possibly they can also stamp them on these creeps’ foreheads.
...
“The goal here is to keep Trump’s public statements, particularly the ones where he pressured Cohen to keep his mouth shut, far away from the jury.”
The goal here is to invent new reasons to moan “I’m being treated so unfairly” and tell his fascist supporters that the law shouldn’t apply to him or by extension to them if they feel like, oh, threatening a judge or a witness, or forming a mob and trying to kill Congress, not that he’s suggesting such a thing oh no God forbid (wink) …