Trump Asks Judge to Toss His Entire Conviction Thanks to Supreme Court

In his latest desperate move to avoid being held to account, Donald Trump is arguing that evidence used to convict him for setting up hush money payments ahead of the 2016 election should be dismissed and his 34-count felony conviction should be vacated based on the Supreme Court’s recent ruling that significantly expanded presidential immunity.

“Because of the implications for the institution of the Presidency, the use of official-acts evidence was a structural error under the federal Constitution that tainted the District Attorney’s grand jury proceedings as well as the trial,” defense lawyers Todd Blanche and Emil Bove wrote in a motion filed on Thursday. “The jury’s verdicts must be vacated.”

The motion was filed on Thursday, the same day Trump was initially scheduled to be sentenced for his felony convictions. Trump’s lawyers pointed to two pieces of evidence—Hope Hicks’s testimony of conversations she had with Trump while he was in office and posts he made on Twitter while he was president—arguing both constituted official actions. The Supreme Court’s ruling doesn’t entirely define what constitutes an official action, but in his lawsuit that came before the Supreme Court, Trump had argued for absolute immunity on the basis that anything a president does is inherently an official act. It’s unclear if the Supreme Court’s ruling is retroactively applicable or if it applies to evidence brought in state-level cases, as it focused on the federal case brought by special counsel Jack Smith in relation to Trump’s fake electors scheme. While some evidence in Trump’s hush-money trial occurred during his presidency, the trial focused on actions Trump took when he was still a candidate, not president.

Whether removing Hicks’s testimony and Trump’s Twitter posts will be discounted as evidence, and whether that change is enough to throw the case is up to the judge. Last week, Judge Juan Merchan agreed to delay Trump’s sentencing to September 18 to review the Supreme Court’s ruling and its impact on the case.

Donald Trump was quick to pounce on one of President Joe Biden’s verbal flubs late Thursday, leveraging a glaring mistake to his advantage.

Moments after finishing his scripted speech, Biden mistakenly referred to Vice President Kamala Harris as “Vice President Trump,” shocking the crowd of reporters as well as some of his Cabinet members in attendance.

“Look, I wouldn’t have picked Vice President Trump to be vice president [inaudible] think she was not qualified to be president, so let’s start there,” Biden said.

Moments later, Trump was resharing a clip of the slipup to his Truth Social page, mocking the president’s inability to keep his characters and facts straight.

“Crooked Joe begins his ‘Big Boy’ Press Conference with, ‘I wouldn’t have picked Vice President Trump to be vice president, though I think she was not qualified to be president,’” Trump wrote, intentionally misquoting what Biden said. “Great job, Joe!”

Trump also took advantage of several other verbal lapses Biden had while responding to members of the White House press corps Thursday evening, including a moment when he stumbled over referring to his chief of staff of the military, and when he slurred the words “intelligence community” and “declassified.”

The easy punches from Biden’s opponent follow a NATO summit in which diplomats and world leaders watched and worried over Biden’s mental fitness, and his subsequent ability to win over the American public and maintain the threatened international alliance. Meanwhile, back at home, Democratic lawmakers are weighing whether to formally rescind their endorsement from Biden as their presumptive presidential nominee.

Even within Biden’s campaign, staffers are reportedly looking for other options: On Thursday, a leaked report revealed that the campaign was quietly polling voters on Harris’s odds, should she take the top of the ticket in a direct match-off against Trump. The leaked poll didn’t include its results, but other polls assessing Harris’s viability have indicated that she would have a slight advantage over Biden.

Former Donald Trump supporters will be featured on multiple billboards near the Milwaukee arena where the Republican National Convention will take place next week, with a simple message for the former president: I won’t vote for you.

The billboards are the handiwork of Republican Voters Against Trump, which has placed similar billboards around the city, sporting simple slogans like, “I won’t vote for a convicted felon.” The project, which has produced 15 billboards and one 60-second ad spot that will run in four swing states, is being funded by the Republican Accountability PAC, and targets moderate Republicans and right-leaning voters in key battlegrounds.

Scott Moore, a 63-year-old Army veteran from Nashville, Tennessee, is one of the former Trump backers whose face will be blown up and featured on the massive signs.

“I always thought a businessman could shake up the good ol’ boy system. I wasn’t thrilled about him, but I thought he was a successful businessman,” Moore told the Tennessee Lookout. He’d voted for Trump in 2016.

But later, he explained, “I saw that what he was doing was about him and not about our country.”

An estimated 2,429 delegates will attend the RNC, which begins Monday in Milwaukee, where they are expected to formally confirm Trump as the Republican Party’s nominee for president. Of those delegates, several are the very same fake electors alleged to have aided Trump’s scheme to overturn the election results in 2020.

To secure the party’s nomination, Trump must clinch 1,215 delegates. This seems likely, as he received 2,243 in the primaries, and former presidential candidate Nikki Haley released her 97 delegates this week, directing them to back Trump’s nomination.

President Joe Biden on Thursday ended a defiant press conference with a strange qualifier on his personal commitment to staying in the presidential race.

When asked directly whether he would consider withdrawing if polling numbers indicated Vice President Kamala Harris would fare better in a matchup against Donald Trump, the 81-year-old president said no, with one caveat.

“You earlier explained confidence in your vice president. If your team came back and showed you data that she would fare better against former President Donald Trump, would you reconsider your decision to stay in the race?” a Scripps reporter asked.

“No, unless they came back and said, ‘There’s no way you can win,’” Biden said, adding “… me.”

“And no one’s saying that. No polls are saying that,” he added in a whisper, launching the room filled with the White House press corps into chaos. It was the last question of one of the most critical evenings of Biden’s presidency, as Democratic lawmakers weigh whether to formally strip their endorsement from Biden as their presumptive presidential nominee.

Despite Biden’s insistence, national polls have shown Harris faring as well or better than him in a direct matchup against Trump in November.

Following a two-hour delay to the beginning of his first major press conference in recent memory, President Joe Biden flubbed almost as soon as he finished reading off the teleprompter.

Responding to a question Thursday about NATO’s reaction to Biden’s increasingly unsteady future in U.S. politics, the 81-year-old president stumbled over the names of who his vice president, and his major opponent, really were.

“Look, I wouldn’t have picked Vice President Trump to be vice president if I didn’t think she was qualified to be vice president,” Biden said, mistakenly referring to Donald Trump instead of Vice President Kamala Harris.

“Why did he call President Trump the Vice President?” asked the official X account of the House GOP moments after the verbal slip.