A federal judge on Tuesday swiftly rejected Donald Trump's request to intervene in his New York hush money criminal case, spurning the former president's attempt at an end-run around the state court where he was convicted and is set to be sentenced in two weeks. US District Judge Alvin Hellerstein's ruling—just hours after Trump's lawyers asked him to weigh the move—upends the Republican presidential nominee's plan to move the case to federal court so that he could seek to have his conviction overturned in the wake of the US Supreme Court's presidential immunity ruling, the AP reports. Trump's lawyers challenged the decision, filing a notice of appeal late Tuesday in the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals. Trump and his lawyers "will continue to fight to move this Hoax into federal court where it should be put out of its misery once and for all," his campaign spokesman says.
Hellerstein, echoing his denial of Trump's pretrial bid to move the case, said the defense failed to meet the high burden of proof for changing jurisdiction and that Trump's conviction for falsifying business records involved his personal life, not official actions that the Supreme Court ruled are immune from prosecution. In a four-page ruling, Hellerstein wrote that nothing about the high court's July 1 ruling affected his previous conclusion that hush money payments at issue in Trump's case "were private, unofficial acts, outside the bounds of executive authority." Hellerstein sidestepped a defense complaint that Trump's state court trial had been plagued by "bias, conflicts of interest, and appearances of impropriety," writing that he "does not have jurisdiction to hear Mr. Trump's arguments concerning the propriety of the New York trial."
The Manhattan district attorney's office, which prosecuted Trump's case, declined comment. Earlier Tuesday, the office sent a letter to the trial judge, Juan M. Merchan, objecting to Trump's effort to delay post-trial decisions in the case while he was seeking to have the US District Court in Manhattan step in. Merchan is expected to rule soon on two key defense requests: Trump's call for the judge to delay his Sept. 18 sentencing until after the November election, and his request that the judge overturn his conviction and dismiss the case in the wake of the Supreme Court's ruling. Merchan has said he will rule Sept. 16 on Trump's motion to overturn the verdict. His decision on delaying sentencing has been expected in the coming days. (More Donald Trump stories.)
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