A former President Donald Trump's sentencing in the criminal hush
money trial in which he was convicted and has now
been delayed until September.
This comes after the former president asked the judge who
was overseeing that trial to toss out his conviction after
the Supreme Court's big ruling on presidential immunity yesterday.
Trump's lawyers say prosecutors relied on evidence and testimony that
should now be inadmissible under that Supreme Court ruling.
ABC senior investigative correspondent Aaron Katersky,
along with ABC senior reporter Catherine Folders and legal contributor
Asharangappa.
Join us now for more.
So, Aaron, what's the latest here?
The judge overseeing former President Trump's criminal hush money case,
Judge Juan Marshawn, has just signaled to the parties,
we're told, that he is going to delay the former
president sentencing until September 18th.
That will give him time to consider a forthcoming motion
from the former president to throw out his conviction of
34 felony counts of falsifying business records because he says
the Supreme Court ruling should now render some evidence inadmissible.
That includes testimony from Hope Hicks.
It also includes a series of the former
president's tweets about Michael Cohen,
a government ethics report that Trump filled out and and
things that should now be off limits.
His attorneys are going to argue,
Terry, the jury took less than 10 hours,
you'll remember, to convict Trump as charged,
find him guilty as charged.
So prosecutors are expected to argue that these little bits
of evidence wouldn't have made much difference.
All right. Well, Asha, let me ask you,
so, you know, what do you make of this?
The Supreme Court's decision yesterday really erecting very significant barriers
in the name of protecting the independence of the president,
barriers to holding any president or former president accountable for
crimes.
How do you read that opinion in light of the
facts of the Trump case?
Yes, well, there's two very sweeping parts of the Supreme
Court's decision, which I think
it's not surprising that Trump's lawyers have raised this appeal.
So the first is that they said that non official
acts and official acts
don't only extend to the distinction between what's explicitly mentioned
in Article two of the Constitution,
that that official immunity can extend to the outer perimeter
of a
president's official duties with things that can sort of almost
be very tenuously connected to what the president does.
The second very important thing is that if something is
qualified as an official act,
you can't use it as evidence of intent and motive.
And so all of those things that Aaron mentioned have
been raised on appeal
are things that Trump will argue are in the outer
perimeter of his official duties,
filling out ethics forms, talking to his White House communications
directors
and that they were introduced for the purpose of indicating
his state of mind or intent.
I think, as Aaron mentioned,
it's a high bar to overturn a jury's verdict.
They have to show that but for this evidence,
they wouldn't have convicted. But I think that it will
cause a significant delay in this case.
Deal with some. All right,
thank you for that, Asha and Catherine.
Also, today's Trump's former trusted ally and lawyer,
Rudy Giuliani was disbarred in New York.
Tell us about that. Yeah,
according to this new ruling in New York,
he's disbarred in New York.
This ruling, says, Terry, and I'm going to quote from
it,
that this is a consequence
demonstrably of his demonstrably false and misleading statements to courts,
lawmakers and the public at large in his capacity as
a lawyer for former President Donald Trump.
Of course, these were comments that he was making in
the wake of the
2020 election where he is pushing false and misleading statements
that Trump won the election through various different means,
as the statement writes, through through through the courts and
publicly.
Of course, Giuliani says that at the time he was
saying these statements and making these statements,
he believed what he was saying.
That's at least his defense of this.
Of course, we've heard from a spokesperson for Giuliani,
Terry, who says he plans to appeal this ruling.
So we'll see how that plays out.
All right, Catherine. Fathers Aaron Katersky,
Ashurangappa. Thanks very much.