Donald Trump’s lawyers cited President Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter Tuesday in their latest push to throw out Trump’s Manhattan “hush money” conviction.
The attorneys argued that Biden’s claim that the cases against Hunter were “infected” by politics echo the president-elect’s argument that the charges of falsifying business records levied against him by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office were politically motivated.
The lawyers added that failing to throw out the jury’s verdict would unconstitutionally interfere with Trump preparing to serve a second term.
The 72-page filing accuses Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, whose office brought the case, of engaging in “political theater,” which Trump’s lawyers say Biden “condemned” while announcing a blanket pardon for his son Sunday night.
Biden’s White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre also defended the pardon Monday by arguing that the cases against Hunter were “politically infected.”
The claims came after Biden had repeatedly promised the American people that he would not pardon his son, who was convicted at two separate trials of tax evasion and lying on official paperwork that he wasn’t addicted to drugs before buying a gun.
Trump, 78, was convicted in May on 34 counts of falsifying business records related to a hush money payment made to former porn star Stormy Daniels.
His federal cases on charges of hoarding classified documents at Mar-A-Lago and trying to overturn the results of his 2020 presidential election loss to Biden before the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the US Capitol are both winding down now that he’s been elected president, officials say.
A state case in Georgia charging him with trying to tamper with the election results there in 2020 has been delayed amid a squabble over a local district attorney’s romantic relationship with the man she hired to lead the prosecution.
Trump was convicted in the Manhattan criminal case of falsifying business records while in the White House in 2017 to cover up the Daniels payment — which was made a year earlier in the stretch run of the 2016 campaign.
The case’s critics have derided Bragg’s use of an unusual legal theory in which jurors found that the fudged records covered up another crime: that Trump, his ex-fixer Michael Cohen, and the National Enquirer magazine had broken an obscure election law by “conspiring” to help Trump beat Democrat Hillary Clinton by buying up and burying sex scandals about him.
Bragg, who has floated delaying Trump’s sentencing until 2029, is due to reply to the filing from Trump’s attorneys by Dec 9.
