Donald Trump has lost his latest bid for a new judge in his New York hush money criminal case as it heads toward a key ruling and potential sentencing next month.
In a decision posted Wednesday, Judge Juan M Merchan declined to step aside and said Trump’s demand was a rehash “rife with inaccuracies and unsubstantiated claims” about the political ties of Merchan’s daughter and his ability to judge the historic case fairly and impartially.
It is the third that the judge has rejected such a request from lawyers for the former president and current Republican nominee. All three times, they argued that Merchan, a state court judge in Manhattan, has a conflict of interest because of his daughter’s work as a political consultant for prominent Democrats and campaigns. Among them was Vice President Kamala Harris when she sought the 2020 nomination for president. She is now her party’s 2024 White House nominee.
A state court ethics panel said last year that Merchan could continue on the case, writing that a relative’s independent political activities are not “a reasonable basis to question the judge’s impartiality”.
Merchan has repeatedly said he is certain he will continue to base his rulings “on the evidence and the law, without fear or favour, casting aside undue influence”. “With these fundamental principles in mind, this Court now reiterates for the third time, that which should already be clear — innuendo and mischaracterisations do not a conflict create,” Merchan wrote in his three-page ruling. “Recusal is therefore not necessary, much less required.”
But with Harris now Trump’s Democratic opponent in this year’s White House election, Trump lawyer Todd Blanche wrote in a letter to the judge last month that the defence’s concerns have become “even more concrete”.
Prosecutors called the claims “a vexatious and frivolous attempt to relitigate” the issue.
Messages seeking comment on the ruling were left with Blanche. The Manhattan district attorney’s office, which prosecuted the case, declined to comment.
Trump was convicted in May of falsifying his business’ records to conceal a 2016 deal to pay off porn actor Stormy Daniels to stay quiet about her alleged 2006 sexual encounter with him. Prosecutors cast the payout as part of a Trump-driven effort to keep voters from hearing salacious stories about him during his first campaign.
Trump says all the stories were false, the business records were not and the case was a political maneuver meant to damage his current campaign. The prosecutor who brought the charges, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, is a Democrat.
Trump has pledged to appeal. Legally, that cannot happen before a defendant is sentenced.
In the meantime, his lawyers took other steps to try to derail the case. Besides the recusal request, they have asked Merchan to overturn the verdict and dismiss the case altogether because of the US Supreme Court’s July ruling on presidential immunity.
That decision 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. Trump’s lawyers argue that in light of the ruling, jurors in the hush money case should not have heard such evidence as former White House staffers describing how the then-president reacted to news coverage of the Daniels deal.
Earlier this month, Merchan set a Sept 16 date to rule on the immunity claim, and Sept 18 for “the imposition of sentence or other proceedings as appropriate”.
The hush money case is one of four criminal prosecutions brought against Trump last year.
One federal case, accusing Trump of illegally hoarding classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, was dismissed last month. The Justice Department is appealing. The others — federal and Georgia state cases concerning Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss — are not positioned to go to trial before the November election.
