A Manhattan judge rejected the request of the re-elected US president Donald Trump to overturn his conviction for hush money after the recent Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity, the Associated Press reported.
However, the outcome of the case remains unclear overall, the AP notes.
Judge Juan Mercan's decision eliminated one potential scenario before Trump returns to office next month, but his lawyers have made other arguments for terminating the trial.
According to the prosecution, Trump's sentence should be commuted before he takes office as president, but should remain in effect.
In May, a jury convicted Trump of 34 counts of falsifying business documents related to a $130,000 hush payment to porn actress Stormy Daniels in 2016. Trump denies wrongdoing. The charges relate to a scheme to conceal hush money payments to Daniels in the final days of Trump's 2016 campaign to silence her allegations that they had sex years earlier, which he denies. A month after the verdict, the Supreme Court ruled that former presidents cannot be prosecuted for official acts they committed while in office, and prosecutors cannot rely on those acts in a case that focuses on purely personal, off-the-record conduct. In his ruling yesterday, Judge Mercan rejected most of Trump's claims that some of the prosecutors' evidence related to his official actions and thus fell under the protection of his immunity. Trump's lawyers are cited the ruling to argue that the jury in the hush money case was given some inappropriate evidence, such as President Trump's tax return form, testimony from some White House aides, and social media posts made during his tenure.
Prosecutors disagreed, saying the evidence in question was only a “small piece” from their case.
Yesterday, Trump's communications director, Stephen Chung, called Merchan's decision "a direct violation of the Supreme Court's immunity ruling."
"This illegal lawsuit should never have been filed and the Constitution demands that it be immediately dismissed," Chung wrote in a statement.