'Intolerable': Manhattan DA issues scorching response to Trump’s motion to erase convictions

10 December 2024

Donald Trump made history earlier this year as the first former U.S. president to be convicted of felony crimes. But now as president-elect, he's arguing that his 34 felony convictions should be dismissed ahead of his impending return to the White House. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg came out hard against Trump's argument in a recent filing.

Lawfare correspondent Anna Bower recently posted Bragg's filing to Bluesky, noting the Manhattan DA's office argued Judge Juan Merchan "should deny Trump’s request to immediately vacate and dismiss the jury’s guilty verdicts against him in New York." In the 82-page filing, Bragg called it "particularly brazen" for Trump's lawyers to suggest that the Constitution's Supremacy Clause means that state court convictions should be thrown out to accommodate an incoming administration.

Trump's attorneys cited the Supreme Court's July 2024 Trump v. United States ruling that grants presidents absolute broad immunity from criminal prosecution for all "official acts" to argue that their client's felony convictions should be thrown out. But Bragg countered that the jury already agreed that Trump's actions were all carried out in his capacity as a private citizen, and not part of any official presidential act.

"The importance of preserving a President’s ability to be held criminally accountable after the expiration of his term has led the Supreme Court to reject applications of presidential immunity that would 'forever thwart' the public’s interest in enforcing its criminal laws," Bragg wrote.

Bragg further reminded Merchan that in the 1974 United States v. Nixon case, the Supreme Court "rejected a sweeping
claim of absolute immunity that would have allowed a sitting President to disregard a criminal subpoena probing into his official acts." He used the Court's conclusion that quashing that subpoena "would mean that a pending 'criminal prosecution may be totally frustrated'" to pivot to a larger point that "such permanent interference with the criminal process was an intolerable result given that presidential immunity is supposed to protect a President’s official decision-making only while in office, not to forever insulate the President from criminal liability — especially for his unofficial conduct."

The Manhattan DA acknowledged that as president, Trump has the right to not allow the business of governing to be disrupted by a criminal sentence. However, he posited that there were fixes to this unprecedented scenario that didn't involve striking his 34 felony convictions.

"The extreme remedy of dismissing the indictment and vacating the jury verdict is not warranted in light of multiple alternative accommodations that would fully address the concerns raised by presidential immunity," Bragg wrote in the filing. "For example, if judgment has not been entered before presidential immunity attaches, the Court could at that point stay further proceedings for the duration of defendant’s presidency... Given the availability of these alternatives to dismissal, this Court should deny defendant’s request to dismiss the indictment and vacate the jury verdict."

Click here to read the full filing.

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