A federal judge again denied President Donald Trump’s legal effort to get his New York state criminal hush money case moved to federal court, a move that could have made it easier to reverse his conviction.
District Judge Alvin Hellerstein said in a ruling Friday that Trump’s cited grounds were “neither new nor legally sufficient.”
Hellerstein has previously denied Trump’s request to move the case, but a federal appellate court ruled last fall that the district court judge must reconsider in light of the landmark presidential immunity ruling in July 2024 from the US Supreme Court.
The judge heard arguments from lawyers for Trump and prosecutors from the Manhattan District Attorney’s office at a hearing in February but did not issue a ruling until now. Friday, Hellerstein maintained his position that Trump’s acts as charged in the state’s case against him were private and unrelated to his federal office.
“The People’s prosecution arises from President Trump’s private conduct surrounding the reimbursement of hush money payments to an adult film star,” Hellerstein wrote Friday. “That conduct, and the challenged evidence, bears no substantive relation to his position in federal office. To consider these facts to be ‘relating to’ a federal office would give the words a definition that is ‘so broad that it is meaningless.’”
Trump will file a “powerful appeal,” a spokesman for his legal team said in a statement.
“The Supreme Court’s historic decision on Immunity, the Federal and New York State Constitutions, and other established legal precedent mandate that the Witch Hunt perpetrated by the Manhattan DA be removed to federal court, and immediately overturned and dismissed,” the spokesman said.
Lawyers for Trump have appealed his 2024 criminal conviction on 34 counts of falsifying business records tied to hush money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels during the 2016 presidential election. Their separate efforts to get the case moved to federal court started before the state trial, so a federal judge could interpret federal preemption and presidential immunity. The federal track would also offer a faster route for his appeal to get to the Supreme Court.
Despite the guilty finding, Trump was sentenced to unconditional discharge, meaning he faced no penalties and the conviction was essentially in name only. It did, however, make Trump the first president convicted of a felony.
Months after his conviction, his lawyers tried again in the wake of the immunity decision that said presidents are protected from criminal prosecution for official acts and barred prosecutors from attempting to enter evidence involving official acts, even if they were pursuing alleged crimes involving that president’s private conduct.
Trump’s defense team has long argued Trump can’t be prosecuted in connection to the hush money scheme because he’s protected by presidential immunity – he reimbursed his former personal attorney Michael Cohen while in office for a cover up scheme Cohen orchestrated during the 2016 election.
In his latest ruling, the judge wrote, “There is no way that discussions regarding hush money payments to cover up the President’s relations with Stormy Daniels could be an official act. An affair, or a cover-up of an affair, is not within the “‘outer perimeter’ of the President’s official responsibilities.”
For Trump, the debate is whether Manhattan prosecutors improperly introduced evidence involving White House staffers’ actions at the hush money trial that they allege was Trump’s crimes as an individual separate from his capacity as president.
Hellerstein disagreed: “A president’s assistant can work on unofficial, personal matters for the president.”
Last November, the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals kicked the case back to Hellerstein and said the district court must reconsider but didn’t weigh in on whether the SCOTUS decision should tip the scales for Trump.
Trump’s lawyers also waited about two months to file that renewed request in federal court, first asking the state court Judge Juan Merchan to dismiss the conviction. Merchan denied the motion and Trump’s appeal of his conviction is still moving through state appellate channels.
In February, Hellerstein called it a strategic decision to petition Merchan before the federal court. “You made a choice. You sought two bites at the apple,” he said, signaling Friday’s ruling back then.
In his order Friday, Hellerstein said Trump waited too long to file the renewed request for removal in federal court. “Trump’s delay in filing for removal constitutes a “quintessential strategic decision,” and the “fact that he later came to view that decision as a poor one is not sufficient, by itself, to establish cause.”
The state appeal is also ongoing and could advance to the New York’s Court of Appeals and potentially reach the US Supreme Court if Trump is unsuccessful at the lower appellate levels.
This story has been updated with additional details.