Donald Trump has lost his latest long-shot bid to overturn his criminal conviction, with a federal judge delivering a brutal takedown of the president’s arguments along the way.
On Friday, U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein rejected Trump’s latest attempt to erase the so-called “hush money” conviction, in which the president was found guilty in 2024 of falsifying business records to cover up a sex scandal with a porn star.
The blockbuster conviction made Trump the first felon in U.S. history to occupy the Oval Office, but Trump has been appealing it ever since the verdict.
He sought to move the state case to federal court after the conservative-dominated Supreme Court gave former presidents immunity for certain acts done within the scope of their constitutional office.
This was Trump’s second attempt to move the case, which would have made it easier for him to overturn the conviction altogether.
However, Hellerstein said that Trump’s actions in the case—in which he had sex with adult film star Stormy Daniels and then paid for her silence—were done in a private capacity and unrelated to his federal office.
In a blow to the president, he also said that Trump’s arguments were “neither new nor legally sufficient.”
“The People’s prosecution arises from President Trump’s private conduct surrounding the reimbursement of hush money payments to an adult film star,” the Clinton-appointed judge wrote.
“That conduct, and the challenged evidence, bears no substantive relation to his position in federal office. To consider these facts to be ‘relating to’ a federal office would give the words a definition that is ‘so broad that it is meaningless.’”
The president has already indicated that he will appeal the decision to the Supreme Court. But the ruling is yet another blow for Trump, who has long maintained he did nothing wrong and was the victim of a political witch-hunt.
Trump spent six weeks on the 15th floor of the Manhattan Criminal Court for the blockbuster case in 2024, listening to 22 witnesses testify about what prosecutors said was a criminal conspiracy to “catch and kill” damning stories that could have derailed his chances of becoming president in 2016.
Numerous stories were buried on Trump’s behalf, including that of an affair with former Playboy Playmate Karen McDougal, which National Inquirer publisher David Pecker paid $150,000 to kill, and an unverified story from a hotel doorman about a love child, which cost $30,000.
But the 34 charges against Trump specifically related to a $130,000 hush money payment Trump’s then-fixer Michael Cohen made to Daniels, who says she had sex with Trump in 2006 when he was newly married to his wife Melania.
This crossed a legal line, prosecutors said, because Trump reimbursed Cohen and falsified records to cover the whole thing up, thereby breaching electoral laws.
Cohen was the star witness in the trial, but has since claimed he was pressured to testify against Trump as he sought to make amends with his former boss.
“They threatened you with everything if you didn’t go against Trump, and you took it back,” the president told him as the pair reunited with a friendly radio interview last week.
“I wouldn’t even be talking to you right now if you didn’t.”
