Editorial: Trump is guilty and not immune -- His Stormy Daniels hush money conviction remains

New York Daily News Editorial Board, New York Daily News on Dec 20, 2024

Published in Op Eds

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Even a terribly wrong-headed decision by the U.S. Supreme Court on a president’s post-White House criminal immunity can’t undo Donald Trump’s 34 felony convictions correctly ruled Acting Manhattan state Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan.

You remember Merchan, who oversaw Trump’s Stormy Daniels hush money trial downtown in the spring that ended on May 30 with 34 guilty verdicts.

On Monday, Merchan said no to Trump, who’s been seeking to wriggle out of his Manhattan conviction ever since the jury rendered their unanimous finding.

After Chief Justice John Roberts and five of his colleagues issued their decision on July 1 related to Special Counsel Jack Smith’s prosecution of Trump for trying to overturn the 2020 election, that “with respect to the president’s exercise of his core constitutional powers, this immunity must be absolute,” Trump has been attempting to shoehorn the embarrassing and tawdry (and criminal) Stormy situation into that definition.

Well, no, since none of the players in the scheme, Trump, Daniels, Michael Cohen or David Pecker were government employees at the time of the offense when Trump illegally doctored his company’s ledgers to hide $130,000 paid to Daniels to buy her silence about a 2006 tryst with Trump. And after Trump was sworn in, Daniels, Cohen and Pecker remained on the outside.

Robert wrote: “When may a former president be prosecuted for official acts taken during his presidency?,” But Merchan had to consider: “Is a president’s in-office conduct to conceal payments to an adult film actress to keep information from the public eye relating to an encounter that occurred prior to his presidency official or unofficial?”

Forget a president’s “core constitutional powers,” this payoff to a porn star while a candidate and private citizen wasn’t even anywhere near the “outer perimeter” of a president’s official responsibility that Roberts expounded on.

When the high court ruled, those elements in the Smith prosecution of what Trump did from Election Day 2020 until Jan. 6 that were as part of his Oval Office duties, such as conferring with the Department of Justice, were deemed covered by immunity and had to be excluded from the case. But Trump’s other, private, acts were not immune.

In the Daniels case, it’s much simpler, as the crime happened before Trump took office on Jan. 20, 2017. The only possible immunity could be President Trump’s interactions with White House staff such as aides Hope Hicks and Madeleine Westerhout, who both testified at the criminal trial.

Merchan ruled that excluding any elements of the prosecution case that could have been immune and therefore not allowed, which also included a government ethics form and some presidential Tweets, still left “overwhelming evidence of guilt.” That some of the forbidden material was still heard by the jury was harmless error.

In other words, had Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg left out everything covered by immunity, there was still so much damning evidence remaining that the outcome would have been exactly the same: guilty.

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