A federal appeals court is set to hear arguments in Trump’s bid to erase his hush money conviction

NEW YORK (AP) — President Donald Trump’s quest to erase his criminal conviction heads to a federal appeals court Wednesday. It’s one way he’s trying to get last year’s hush money verdict overturned.

A three-judge panel is set to hear arguments in Trump’s long-running fight to get the New York case moved from state court to federal court, where he could then try to have the verdict thrown out on presidential immunity grounds.

The Republican is asking the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to intervene after a lower-court judge twice rejected the move. As part of the request, Trump wants the federal appeals court to seize control of the criminal case and then ultimately decide his appeal of the verdict, which is now pending in a state appellate court.

The 2nd Circuit should “determine once and for all that this unprecedented criminal prosecution of a former and current President of the United States belongs in federal court,” Trump’s lawyers wrote in a court filing.

The Manhattan district attorney’s office, which prosecuted Trump’s case, wants it to stay in state court. Trump’s Justice Department — now partly run by his former criminal defense lawyers — backs his bid to move the case to federal court.

If Trump loses, he could go to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Trump was convicted in May 2024 of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to conceal a hush money payment to porn actor Stormy Daniels, whose affair allegations threatened to upend his 2016 presidential campaign. Trump denies her claim and said he did nothing wrong. It was the only one of his four criminal cases to go to trial.

Trump’s lawyers first sought to move the case to federal court following his March 2023 indictment, arguing that federal officers including former presidents have the right to be tried in federal court for charges arising from “conduct performed while in office.” Part of the criminal case involved checks he wrote while he was president.

They tried again after his conviction, arguing that Trump’s historic prosecution violated his constitutional rights and ran afoul of the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity ruling, which was decided about a month after the hush money trial ended.

The ruling reins in prosecutions of ex-presidents for official acts and restricts prosecutors in pointing to official acts as evidence that a president’s unofficial actions were illegal.

U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein denied both requests, ruling in part that Trump’s conviction involved his personal life, not his work as president.

In a four-page ruling, Hellerstein wrote that nothing about the high court’s ruling affected his prior conclusion that hush money payments at issue in Trump’s case “were private, unofficial acts, outside the bounds of executive authority.”

Trump’s lawyers argue that prosecutors rushed to trial instead of waiting for the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity decision, and that prosecutors erred by showing jurors evidence that should not have been allowed under the ruling, such as former White House staffers describing how Trump reacted to news coverage of the hush money deal and tweets he sent while president in 2018.

Trump’s former criminal defense lawyer Todd Blanche is now the deputy U.S. attorney general, the Justice Department’s second-in-command. Another of his lawyers, Emil Bove, has a high-ranking Justice Department position.

The trial judge, Juan M. Merchan, rejected Trump’s requests to throw out the conviction on presidential immunity grounds and sentenced him on Jan. 10 to an unconditional discharge, leaving his conviction intact but sparing him any punishment.

Appearing by video at his sentencing, Trump called the case a “political witch hunt,” “a weaponization of government” and “an embarrassment to New York.”