U.S. District Judge Alvin K Hellerstein on Wednesday rejected the former president’s bid to move his hush-money criminal case from New York state court to federal court, ruling that Trump’s lawyers had failed to meet a high legal bar for changing jurisdiction.
Hellerstein found that the allegations pertained to Trump’s personal life, not presidential duties that would have merited a move to federal court.
Hellerstein’s decision sets the stage for Trump to stand trial in state court in Manhattan as early as next spring, overlapping with the 2024 presidential primary season in what could be a frenetic stretch of legal action as the twice-indicted Republican seeks a return to the White House.
Separately, Trump is charged in federal court in Florida with i llegally hoarding classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate and impeding investigators. Prosecutors want that case to go to trial in December. Trump lawyer Todd Blanche declined comment on Hellerstein’s ruling, which can be appealed to the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan. The judge signaled his decision at a hearing on the matter late last month, scoffing at defense claims that the alleged conduct at the root of Trump’s charges — reimbursing his longtime personal lawyer Michael Cohen as part of a scheme to bury affair allegations that arose during his first campaign — was within the “color of his office” as president.
Hellerstein said evidence suggested that Cohen, who arranged and made some of the hush-money payments, “was hired privately, not under color of any presidential office or related to it.” There are invoices showing how much Cohen was paid, “but no proof of what he did,” the judge said at the June 27 hearing. Trump, a Republican, pleaded not guilty April 4 in state court to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to hide reimbursements made to Cohen for his role in paying USD 130,000 to the porn actor Stormy Daniels, who claims she had an extramarital sexual encounter with Trump years earlier. Cohen also arranged for the National Enquirer to pay Playboy model Karen McDougal USD 150,000 for the rights to her story about an alleged affair, which the supermarket tabloid then squelched in a dubious journalism practice known as “catch-and-kill.”
