Kaelan Deese writes for the Washington Examiner about former President Donald Trump’s response to his recent criminal conviction.
Former President Donald Trump has urged the Supreme Court to intervene in his hush money case in New York despite legal experts suggesting the likelihood of this happening soon, or at all, remaining low at this point.
Trump, the leading Republican candidate for president, made his long-shot call for Supreme Court intervention in a post Sunday on Truth Social, days after a Manhattan jury found him guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.
However, most legal experts say Trump’s case must first navigate the New York state appeals process, which could take years under normal scheduling procedures. Only after exhausting state appeals can Trump petition the Supreme Court, which typically addresses matters of federal or constitutional law.
“Trump has a lot of arguments on appeal, but most of those are state arguments,” former federal prosecutor Neama Rahmani told the Washington Examiner.
“The federal ones would have to really relate to a procedural or more likely a substantive due process. So, you know, things like a change of venue or the judge’s failure to disqualify himself on some of his daughter’s political activity, maybe he can make those arguments,” Rahmani said.
Some of Trump’s allies have also advocated a quick Supreme Court review. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) reflected Trump’s sentiments in a Fox News interview last week, asserting that the Supreme Court should intervene.
A jury convicted Trump of falsifying business records in the first degree for incorrectly labeling payments to his former attorney Michael Cohen, whom Trump reimbursed in 2017 for Cohen’s effort to suppress porn star Stormy Daniels’s affair allegations ahead of the 2016 race. But the felony conviction meant the jury also had to have found Trump intended to commit “another crime” by falsifying the documents.
