(The Center Square) – President-elect Donald Trump lashed out at the judge overseeing his New York hush money case Tuesday after the judge ruled Trump wasn’t protected by presidential immunity.
On Monday, Judge Juan Merchan denied Trump’s motion to dismiss the conviction on grounds of presidential immunity because he said Trump’s actions in the case were unofficial and thus not protected by the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent immunity ruling.
“The preserved claims relate entirely to unofficial conduct and thus, receive no immunity protections,” the judge wrote.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office had previously suggested a four-year pause on proceedings in the case until Trump is done with his second term in the White House and the immunity protections no longer apply.
Trump has repeatedly said his political opponents coordinated the criminal cases against him.
Federal prosecutors have already moved to end two criminal cases against Trump – the election interference case in Washington D.C. and the classified documents case in Florida.
Trump called the order “completely illegal” and “psychotic.” He called the judge “corrupt, biased and incompetent.”
“This illegitimate case is nothing but a Rigged Hoax. Merchan, who is a radical partisan, wrote an opinion that is knowingly unlawful, goes against our Constitution, and, if allowed to stand, would be the end of the Presidency as we know it,” Trump wrote Tuesday on Truth Social. “Merchan has so little respect for the Constitution that he is keeping in place an illegal gag order on me, your President and President-Elect, just so I cannot expose his and his family’s disqualifying and illegal conflicts.”
The gag order prevents Trump from discussing witnesses or jurors, but he is free to criticize the judge and Bragg.
“This has to stop!” Trump wrote. “It is time to end the Lawfare once and for all, so we can come together as one Nation and, Make America Great Again.”
In May, a Manhattan jury convicted Trump of 34 counts of falsifying business records for disguising hush money payments to an adult film actress as legal costs ahead of the 2016 election.
Under New York state law, falsifying business records in the first degree is a Class E felony with a maximum sentence of four years in prison.
In July, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled presidents and former presidents have absolute immunity for actions related to core constitutional powers and presumptive immunity for official actions. The ruling said the president has no immunity for unofficial conduct.
