More than two years after President Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts stemming from a 2016 “hush money” payment to an adult-film actress, his lawyers will argue his appeal Thursday in New York.
Mr. Trump’s legal team has changed since the trial. Todd Blanche, a former defense lawyer, is now the U.S. attorney general, while another former attorney, Emil Bove III, is a federal judge. His current personal lawyers have nevertheless continued to advance arguments that echoed those made during the 2024 trial.
An Oct. 16 filing by Mr. Trump’s attorney Robert Giuffra, co-chair of the prominent law firm Sullivan & Cromwell, opened with a phrase Mr. Trump has repeatedly used in statements and social media posts: The case “should have never been brought.”
Attorneys for Mr. Trump and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg will each have 15 minutes to answer questions from New York’s intermediate appellate court, the Appellate Division, First Department. Both sides have indicated that the dispute is likely to proceed to the state’s highest court, the Court of Appeals, and potentially to the U.S. Supreme Court.
A unanimous jury convicted Mr. Trump in May 2024 over a scheme to falsify business records involving reimbursements to Michael Cohen, who was his attorney at the time. Days before the 2016 election, Cohen paid $130,000 to adult-film actress Stormy Daniels in exchange for her silence about an alleged sexual encounter with Mr. Trump years earlier. Mr. Trump has denied the allegations.
Mr. Trump’s lawyers argue that the payment was governed by federal election laws, which they say preempted the state prosecution. They also contend that prosecutors violated presidential immunity and failed to prove that Mr. Trump acted with an “intent to defraud.”
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“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 described the 2016 “hush money” arrangement 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 one week after the death of a judge who oversaw a yearslong parallel effort by Mr. Trump to move the case from state court to federal court.
The judge, Alvin Hellerstein, repeatedly rejected Mr. Trump’s arguments and offered a particularly forceful response to his claim that the payments reimbursing Cohen were connected to his official duties 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.”
