More than two years after President Trump was convicted of 34 felonies tied to a 2016 “hush money” payment to an adult film star, his lawyers are set to argue their appeal Thursday in New York.
Mr. Trump’s attorneys in the case have changed — one former defense attorney, Todd Blanche, is now U.S. attorney general, and another, Emil Bove III, is a federal judge — but his new team of personal lawyers has continued in filings to echo the arguments he made throughout the trial in 2024.
An Oct. 16 filing by Mr. Trump’s attorney Robert Giuffra, the powerful co-chair of the white shoe firm Sullivan & Cromwell, began with a line that Mr. Trump himself frequently said and posted on social media: The case, “should have never been brought.”
Lawyers for Mr. Trump and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg will each get 15 minutes to respond to questions from New York’s mid-level appeals panel, the Appellate Division, First Department. Each side has indicated that the case is destined for the state’s highest court, called the Court of Appeals, and potentially the U.S. Supreme Court.
A unanimous jury convicted Mr. Trump in May 2024 for his part in a scheme to falsify business records related to reimbursements made to Michael Cohen, his attorney at the time. Cohen had paid $130,000 to adult film star Stormy Daniels, days before the 2016 election, in exchange for her silence about an alleged sexual encounter with Mr. Trump years earlier. Mr. Trump has denied the allegations.
The payment, Mr. Trump’s attorney argued, should have been subject to federal election laws that they say preempt state prosecutions. They also claim the prosecutors violated presidential immunity and failed to show Mr. Trump had an “intent to defraud.”
“The question here is whether the White House statements and strategy introduced at trial in this criminal case—responding to public allegations of personal wrongdoing bearing directly on the President’s integrity and fitness for office—were official,” Giuffra wrote.
Lawyers for Bragg have characterized the 2016 “hush money” plan as “a conspiracy to defraud the American public and government regulators.”
“The criminal charges here arose from [Mr. Trump’s] unofficial, non-presidential conduct—as multiple courts have already found,” they wrote in a July brief.
The arguments come a week after the death of a judge who was presiding over a yearslong parallel effort by Mr. Trump to move the case from state to criminal court.
The judge, Alvin Hellerstein, repeatedly rejected Mr. Trump’s arguments, and was particularly scathing in his response to Mr. Trump’s claim that the reimbursements to Cohen were related to his official work as president.
“Reimbursing Cohen for advancing hush money to [Stormy Daniels] cannot be considered the performance of a constitutional duty,” Hellerstein wrote. “Falsifying business records to hide such reimbursement, and to transform the reimbursement into a business expense for Trump and income to Cohen, likewise does not relate to a presidential duty.”
