Donald Trump’s lawyers are trying to claim that President Joe Biden’s pardon of his son, Hunter, is cause to throw out every single one of Trump’s 34 felony guilty verdicts in his hush money case in New York.
“President Biden asserted that his son was ‘selectively, and unfairly, prosecuted,’ and ‘treated differently,’” his counsel wrote in a filing made public Tuesday. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, they argued, did the very thing “that President Biden condemned” when his office prosecuted the case against Trump for falsifying business records to help his 2016 presidential campaign.
Trump’s attorneys cited other reasons for the dismissal as well, like a supposed “overwhelming national mandate” shown by the results of the presidential election last month. Additionally, they say, a pending sentence would amount to “disruptions to the institution of the Presidency” that are unconstitutional.
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The filing, which was made by Todd Blanche and Emil Bove, both of whom Trump has selected for high-level Justice Department jobs, also mentions how Special Counsel Jack Smith filed a motion to dismiss the federal election interference case. DOJ precedent states that presidents cannot be prosecuted while in office.
Before the trial even began, Trump’s legal team made several attempts to have it thrown out on various grounds, including the fact that he was then a candidate for president. That tactic didn’t change after Trump became a convicted felon, either. After the Supreme Court granted former presidents sweeping immunity from prosecution for “official” acts, they tried to leverage that ruling to have the convictions tossed, even though not all of the crimes Trump committed occurred while he was president.
After the election, prosecutors haven’t made any moves to go along with the defense’s request to dismiss the case. Rather, they have signaled they’re open to delaying sentencing until 2029, when Trump’s second term expires.
Sentencing has been pushed back several times. A date had originally been set for July, then September, and finally late November, until it was postponed indefinitely.
