Judge rejects Trump’s latest demand to step aside from hush money criminal case
Donald Trump has lost his latest bid for a new judge in his New York hush money criminal case as it heads toward a key ruling and potential sentencing next month.
In a decision posted Wednesday, Judge Juan M. Merchan declined to step aside and said Trump’s demand was a rehash “rife with inaccuracies and unsubstantiated claims” about his ability to remain impartial.
It is the third time that the judge has rejected such a request from lawyers for the former president and current Republican nominee. They contend that the judge has a conflict of interest because his daughter works as a political consultant for prominent Democrats, including Vice President Kamala Harris when she sought the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. Harris is now the party’s nominee against Trump.
The judge’s daughter, Loren Merchan, met Harris occasionally in 2019 but never “developed an individual relationship” with her, consulting firm founder Mike Nellis told the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), in a letter Tuesday. The firm, Authentic Campaigns Inc., has not worked for Harris’ campaign, President Biden’s now-ended reelection bid or the Democratic National Committee in the 2024 election cycle, Nellis said.
A state court ethics panel said last year that Merchan could continue on the case, writing that a relative’s independent political activities are not “a reasonable basis to question the judge’s impartiality.”
Jurors deliberated for 9½ hours over two days before convicting former President Trump of all 34 counts he faced in a hush-money scheme surrounding the 2016 election.
Merchan, a state court judge in Manhattan, acknowledged last year that he made several small donations to Democratic causes during the 2020 campaign, including $15 to Biden. But Merchan has repeatedly said he will continue to base his rulings “on the evidence and the law, without fear or favor, casting aside undue influence.”
“With these fundamental principles in mind, this Court now reiterates for the third time, that which should already be clear — innuendo and mischaracterizations do not a conflict create,” Merchan wrote. “Recusal is therefore not necessary, much less required.”
But Trump lawyer Todd Blanche wrote in a letter to the judge last month that the defense’s concerns have become “even more concrete.” Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung, citing Merchan’s donation to Biden and Loren Merchan’s consulting work, slammed him as a “highly conflicted judge.”
Prosecutors called the claims “a vexatious and frivolous attempt to relitigate” the issue.
Trump was convicted in May on 34 felony counts of falsifying his business’ records to conceal a 2016 deal to pay off porn actor Stormy Daniels to stay quiet about her alleged 2006 sexual encounter with him. Prosecutors cast the payout as part of a Trump-driven effort to keep voters from hearing salacious stories about him during his first campaign.
Trump claims all the stories were false, the business records were not and the case was a political maneuver meant to damage his current campaign. The prosecutor who brought the charges, Manhattan Dist. Atty. Alvin Bragg, is a Democrat. Trump has pledged to appeal. Legally, that cannot happen before a defendant is sentenced.
The nation’s high court refuses to decide quickly on Trump’s claim that he cannot be prosecuted for the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
His lawyers have taken other steps to try to derail the case, including asking Merchan to overturn the verdict and dismiss the case because of the U.S. Supreme Court’s July ruling on presidential immunity.
That decision reins in prosecutions of former presidents for official acts and restricts prosecutors in pointing to official acts as evidence that a president’s unofficial actions were illegal. Trump’s lawyers argue that in light of the ruling, jurors in the hush money case should not have heard such evidence as former White House staffers describing how the then-president reacted to news coverage of the Daniels deal.
Merchan has set a Sept. 16 date to rule on the immunity claim, and Sept. 18 for “the imposition of sentence or other proceedings as appropriate.”
Even before his big Supreme Court win, Trump promised to be ‘dictator for one day.’ Will the ruling embolden him further?
The hush money case is one of four criminal prosecutions brought against Trump last year.
One federal case, accusing Trump of illegally hoarding classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, was dismissed last month. The Justice Department is appealing. The others — federal and Georgia state cases concerning Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss — are not positioned to go to trial before the November election.
Sisak and Pelz write for the Associated Press.
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