By Luc Cohen
NEW YORK (Reuters) -A New York judge declined for a third time to step aside from the case in which Donald Trump was convicted of charges involving hush money paid to a porn star, dismissing the former U.S. president’s claim of conflict of interest related to political consultancy work by the judge’s daughter.
As he did last April and in August 2023, Justice Juan Merchan in a decision released on Wednesday denied a request by Trump’s lawyers that he recuse himself from the first case involving criminal charges against a former U.S. president. Merchan is scheduled to sentence Trump on Sept. 18.
“Defendant has provided nothing new for this Court to consider. Counsel has merely repeated arguments that have already been denied by this and higher courts” and were “rife with inaccuracies and unsubstantiated claims,” Merchan wrote in the ruling, dated August 13.
Trump was found guilty by a jury on May 30 on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records for having covered up former personal lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen’s $130,000 payment to adult film actress Stormy Daniels to avert a sex scandal before the 2016 U.S. election.
Two months later, his lawyers made their third request that Merchan step aside, arguing that his daughter’s work for a political consultancy that has counted Democratic campaigns among its clients – including the unsuccessful bid by Kamala Harris for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination – posed a conflict of interest.
Harris, now vice president, is the Democratic presidential candidate facing Republican nominee Trump in the Nov. 5 U.S. election.
Falsifying business records is a crime punishable by up to four years in prison, though sentences such as fines or probation have been more common for others convicted of that crime.
Prosecutors with Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office, which brought the charges, had called Trump’s recusal request a “frivolous” attempt to relitigate an issue that was resolved twice before.
“No amount of overheated, hyperbolic rhetoric can cure the fatal defects in defendant’s ongoing effort to impugn the fairness of these proceedings,” prosecutors wrote in an Aug. 1 court filing.
The payment to Daniels was made in exchange for her silence before the 2016 election about a sexual encounter she has said she had with Trump a decade earlier, which Trump denied. Trump went on to win the presidency by defeating Democrat Hillary Clinton.
Merchan rejected a recusal request in April before jury selection in the trial and last year after an ethics panel found that his daughter’s work did not pose reasonable questions about the judge’s impartiality.
During the trial, Trump took to his social media platform to deride Merchan as a “highly conflicted” overseer of a “kangaroo court.” Ahead of the trial, Trump wrote on social media that Merchan’s daughter “makes money by working to ‘Get Trump,'” comments that in part contributed to Merchan’s decision to expand a gag order to bar the former president from commenting publicly about family members of court staff or prosecutors.
Trump’s lawyers separately have asked the judge to throw out his conviction in light of the U.S. Supreme Court’s July ruling giving former presidents broad immunity from prosecution for official acts taken in office. Merchan has said he will decide on Trump’s arguments by Sept. 16.
(Additional reporting by Susan Heavey in Washington; Editing by Will Dunham, Noeleen Walder and Chizu Nomiyama)
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