Donald Trump’s lawyers plan to appeal his conviction after the ex-president was found guilty in his historic secret trial.
A New York jury on Thursday found Trump guilty of all 34 counts of falsifying secret payments to porn star Stormy Daniels and he will be sentenced on July 11.
Trump’s legal team is expected to appeal, but the unprecedented conviction sets off a process that all convicted felons face in Manhattan’s criminal justice system.
The sentencing will mark the start of a 30-day deadline for the former president to appeal — a lengthy process that some legal experts say will be an uphill battle for Trump.
“It’s all uncharted territory, as far as an appeal issue goes. I certainly don’t think there have been any prosecutions for falsifying business records like this,” Barry Kamins, a retired judge and professor at Brooklyn Law School, told the New York Times.
Donald Trump’s lawyers are preparing a lawsuit to appeal his conviction after the ex-president was found guilty on Thursday.
Trump vowed to fight his conviction Friday and highlighted two areas his team will raise on appeal: the location of the trial and the judge.
“We wanted a change of venue where we could have a fair trial. We didn’t understand it. We wanted a judge who was not conflicted,” he said.
Mark Zauderer, a New York lawyer and member of a committee reviewing appeal requests, told the Times that it would be difficult for Trump’s team to successfully appeal on the judge’s basis.
“This case presents none of the usual red flags for a reversal on appeal. The judge’s attitude was impeccable,” Zauderer said.
During the five-week trial, prosecutors alleged a plot by Trump to “corrupt” the 2016 election by hiding a secret $130,000 payment by his “fixer” Michael Cohen to the porn star Stormy Daniels.
Daniels alleged that she and Trump had sex ten years earlier, which he denied.
The case featured explosive evidence from Daniels and lifted the lid on the “catch and kill” practices of the National Enquirer tabloid, which bought stories that could harm Trump and deleted them.
But the actual criminal charges concern something more prosaic: reimbursements that Trump signed for Cohen for payment.
The reimbursements, paid by Trump in monthly installments, were recorded as legal fees.
Prosecutors say it was a fraudulent label intended to conceal the purpose of the secret transaction and illegally interfere in the 2016 election.
Defense attorneys argued that Cohen actually did important legal work for Trump and his family and was paid for it.
Another avenue Trump’s lawyers could try would be to challenge the notion that Trump caused a false entry in the records of a “company.”
A New York jury found Trump guilty on all 34 counts of falsifying secret payments to porn star Stormy Daniels.
His lawyers could argue that they were Trump’s personal documents and not his company’s.
Another possibility would be to challenge the legal theory of the prosecution for the crime of conspiracy under the election law, according to which the judge had to give the jury complex instructions,
“The more complex the jury instructions, the more likely they are to address issues on appeal,” Nathaniel Z. Marmur, a New York appellate lawyer, told the Times. “And these are some of the most complex instructions imaginable.”
Trump’s next step will be to turn to the First Department’s Appellate Division to try to overturn his conviction on 34 counts.
Following their decision, Trump’s team or the prosecution could ask the state’s highest court, the New York Court of Appeals, to review the decision.
The final option would be for the former president’s team to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to review the case.
“This is a senseless conviction from a state court, I don’t see a plausible path to the Supreme Court,” Zauderer said.
Still, Trump’s team hasn’t ruled out taking the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, which decided to intervene in his election interference case in Washington, D.C., hearing his immunity claims presidential.
A call is unlikely to be made before the 2024 election, where Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, faces President Joe Biden.
Biden even addressed Trump’s right to appeal during his speech at the White House, where he defended the jury process and condemned Trump’s “reckless” decision to call the trial “rigged just because you don’t don’t like the verdict.”
He said Trump had “the opportunity to appeal this decision, just like everyone else has that opportunity.” This is how the American system works,” he said.
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