Prosecutors defend Trump’s New York criminal conviction after Supreme Court immunity ruling

New York prosecutors denounced former President Donald Trump‘s effort to get his conviction in his hush money case thrown out based on the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity ruling.

Trump wants both the guilty verdict and the indictment tossed out after the Supreme Court’s conservative majority granted Trump and future indicted presidents significant criminal immunity on July 1.

As part of that decision, which was made in Trump’s federal election interference case, five Republican-appointed justices ruled that evidence of presidential actions that are immune from prosecution can’t even be used in evidence when prosecuting non-official actions. Trump is arguing that evidence introduced in his New York criminal trial and earlier, before the grand jury that indicted him, ran afoul of the newly-announced rule.

But prosecutors in Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office said in a filing that was publicly released Thursday that the Supreme Court’s ruling is inapplicable to Trump’s conviction. And even if the ruling did call for excluding evidence from the trial, they said that still wouldn’t be a reason to overturn the verdict.

“For all the pages that defendant devotes to his current motion, the evidence that he claims is affected by the Supreme Court’s ruling constitutes only a sliver of the mountains of testimony and documentary proof that the jury considered in finding him guilty of all 34 felony charges beyond a reasonable doubt,” according to the filing.

Judge Juan Merchan already bumped Trump’s scheduled sentencing from July 11 to Sept. 18 in order to first address whether the convictions should be tossed out based on Trump’s argument that improper evidence came into the trial.

Trump attacks evidence used at trial

A 12-person jury unanimously convicted Trump of falsifying 34 business records in order to cover up a 2016 election-interference conspiracy involving hush money to porn star Stormy Daniels.

Trump says that various pieces of evidence constituted immune official conduct, including testimony by former Trump aide Hope Hicks that a conversation with Trump during his presidency led her to believe he preferred having news of the hush money payment break in 2018 rather than before the 2016 election.

Prosecutor Joshua Steinglass described the Hicks testimony as “devastating” in his closing argument to the jury, adding that it “puts the nail in Mr. Trump’s coffin.”

Prosecutors have previously said they don’t believe Trump’s latest arguments have merit, although they consented to delaying the sentencing.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Prosecutors fight Trump’s immunity challenge to NY criminal conviction