NEW YORK: Donald Trump has lost his latest bid for a new judge in his New York hush money criminal case as it heads toward a key ruling and potential sentencing next month.
\nIn a decision posted Wednesday, Judge Juan M. Merchan declined to step aside and said Trump\u2019s demand was a rehash \u201crife with inaccuracies and unsubstantiated claims\u201d about the political ties of Mercan\u2019s daughter and his ability to judge the historic case fairly and impartially.
\nIt is the third that the judge has rejected such a request from lawyers for the former president and current Republican nominee.
\nAll three times, they argued that Merchan, a state court judge in Manhattan, has a conflict of interest because of his daughter\u2019s work as a political consultant for prominent Democrats and campaigns. Among them was Vice President Kamala Harris when she ran for president in 2020. She is now her party\u2019s 2024 White House nominee.
\nA state court ethics panel said last year that Merchan could continue on the case, writing that a relative\u2019s independent political activities are not \u201ca reasonable basis to question the judge\u2019s impartiality.\u201d
\nMerchan has repeatedly said he is certain he will continue to base his rulings \u201con the evidence and the law, without fear or favor, casting aside undue influence.\u201d
\n\u201cWith these fundamental principles in mind, this Court now reiterates for the third time, that which should already be clear \u2014 innuendo and mischaracterizations do not a conflict create,\u201d Merchan wrote in his three-page ruling. \u201cRecusal is therefore not necessary, much less required.\u201d
\nBut with Harris now Trump\u2019s Democratic opponent in this year\u2019s White House election, Trump lawyer Todd Blanche wrote in a letter to the judge last month that the defense\u2019s concerns have become \u201ceven more concrete.\u201d
\nProsecutors called the claims \u201ca vexatious and frivolous attempt to relitigate\u201d the issue.
\nMessages seeking comment on the ruling were left with Blanche. The Manhattan district attorney\u2019s office, which prosecuted the case, declined to comment.
\nTrump was convicted in May of falsifying his business\u2019 records to conceal a 2016 deal to pay off porn actor Stormy Daniels to stay quiet about her alleged 2006 sexual encounter with him. Prosecutors cast the payout as part of a Trump-driven effort to keep voters from hearing salacious stories about him during his first campaign.
\nTrump says all the stories were false, the business records were not and the case was a political maneuver meant to damage his current campaign. The prosecutor who brought the charges, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, is a Democrat.
\nTrump has pledged to appeal. Legally, that cannot happen before a defendant is sentenced.
\nIn the meantime, his lawyers took other steps to try to derail the case. Besides the recusal request, they have asked Merchan to overturn the verdict and dismiss the case altogether because of the US Supreme Court\u2019s July ruling on presidential immunity.
\nThat decision reins in prosecutions of ex-presidents for official acts and restricts prosecutors in pointing to official acts as evidence that a president\u2019s unofficial actions were illegal. Trump\u2019s lawyers argue that in light of the ruling, jurors in the hush money case should not have heard such evidence as former White House staffers describing how the then-president reacted to news coverage of the Daniels deal.
\nEarlier this month, Merchan set a Sept. 16 date to rule on the immunity claim, and Sept. 18 for \u201cthe imposition of sentence or other proceedings as appropriate.\u201d
\nThe hush money case is one of four criminal prosecutions brought against Trump last year.
\nOne federal case, accusing Trump of illegally hoarding classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, was dismissed last month. The Justice Department is appealing.
\nThe others \u2014 federal and Georgia state cases concerning Trump\u2019s efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss \u2014 are not positioned to go to trial before the November election.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
NEW YORK: Donald Trump has lost his latest bid for a new judge in his New York hush money criminal case as it heads toward a key ruling and potential sentencing next month. In a decision posted Wednesday, Judge Juan M. Merchan declined to step aside and said Trump\u2019s demand was a rehash \u201crife with …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":68835,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-68821","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68821","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68821"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68821\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":68852,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68821\/revisions\/68852"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/68835"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68821"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68821"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68821"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}