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3 weeks ago
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Donald Trump has launched a vitriolic and factually baseless attack on a New York judge who refused to overturn his conviction on a hush money case that made him the first sitting or former US president to carry the status of a convicted felon.
The president-elect took to his Truth Social platform to condemn judge Juan Merchan as “psychotic” and “corrupt” after he rejected Trump’s plea that his conviction relating to the cover-up of a sex scandal should be thrown out on the basis of a supreme court ruling that granted him broad immunity.
“In a completely illegal, psychotic order, the deeply conflicted, corrupt, biased, and incompetent Acting Justice Juan Merchan has completely disrespected the United States Supreme Court, and its Historic Decision on Immunity,” wrote Trump, who returns to the White House on 20 January.
In a fulminating broadside, he denounced Merchan – an experienced judge who has tried multiple complex cases in 17 years on the bench – as a “radical partisan” and accused him of writing “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”.
Merchan rejected Trump’s application to have last May’s conviction – delivered by a jury in a court in Manhattan – overturned in a 41-page ruling delivered on Monday.
He wrote that Trump’s “decidedly personal acts of falsifying business records poses no danger of intrusion on the authority and function of the executive branch”.
His decision was a blow to the legal strategy of Trump’s lawyers, who had asked him to set aside the conviction immediately after the supreme court ruled last July that presidents – including Trump – had wide immunity from prosecution for actions they took in the course of their duties, even when they broke the law.
Trump’s 34 convictions on business record falsification related to payments made in the run up to the 2016 presidential election to Stormy Daniels, an adult film star, to buy her silence about a sexual encounter she says took place but which Trump denied.
Although the offences took place before Trump was president, his lawyers cited the supreme court opinion to argue that some improper evidence had been presented at the trial, including his presidential financial disclosure form and testimony from his White House aides.
But Merchan, in his ruling, appeared to accept prosecutors’ arguments that evidence from Trump’s White House years amounted to only a “sliver” of their case. He called any mistakenly submitted testimony “harmless in light of the overwhelming evidence of guilt”.
It is not Trump’s first attack on Merchan, who he previously lambasted as “a certified Trump hater”.
During last May’s trial, Trump and his supporters unsuccessfully demanded that Merchan recuse himself from the case, citing contributions of $35 he had made to the Democrats in 2020, including $15 to Joe Biden’s campaign.
They also pointed out that his daughter, Loren Merchan, was president of a firm that worked on digital advertising and fundraising for Democrat clients, including Biden and Adam Schiff, a Congress member and recently-elected senator who Trump branded an “enemy within” during his campaign.
Merchan slapped 10 gag orders on Trump during the trial, acts which the president-elect referenced in Tuesday’s post. “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,” he wrote.
