Trump Cites Hunter Biden Pardon In Latest Bid To Wipe Out His Hush Money Conviction

NEW YORK — Donald Trump is already trying to use the Hunter Biden pardon for his own legal and political gain.

In his latest bid to toss out his criminal conviction in the Manhattan hush money case, Trump repeatedly invoked President Joe Biden’s justification for pardoning his own son. Trump himself has been subject to the same sort of politically motivated prosecutions that Biden condemned in his pardon announcement, the former president’s lawyers argued.

The rhetoric came in a 69-page court filing, made public Tuesday, in which Trump’s lawyers set forth their legal arguments seeking to have the hush money case dismissed now that Trump is the president-elect. They previewed those arguments in a letter to the presiding judge, Justice Juan Merchan, shortly after the election.

In the new filing — which at times reads more like a grievance-laden Trump stump speech than a legal brief — Trump lawyers Todd Blanche and Emil Bove argued that Biden’s assertions about Hunter Biden having been “selectively, and unfairly, prosecuted” and “treated differently” were tantamount to an “extraordinary condemnation of President Biden’s own DOJ.”

Trump has tapped Blanche and Bove for the second- and third-highest positions in the Justice Department in his second term.

The Justice Department didn’t prosecute the hush money case against Trump, in which a jury convicted him in May of 34 felony counts of falsifying documents to conceal a hush money deal with a porn star in the final days of the 2016 election. The case was handled by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office. But Blanche and Bove wrote that the Justice Department had targeted Trump, both through the two separate federal prosecutions of Trump by special counsel Jack Smith and by allegedly having “sent” a prosecutor, Matthew Colangelo, to Bragg’s office to pursue “this empty and lawless case.”

Bragg hired Colangelo, a former Justice Department official, in December 2022. Trump was indicted in the hush money case the following spring. There is no evidence the Justice Department deployed Colangelo to work on Bragg’s team, despite Trump’s repeated claims.

The hush money conviction carries a sentence of up to four years in prison. Trump had been scheduled to be sentenced late last month, but Merchan agreed to delay that sentencing indefinitely while he weighs Trump’s effort to have the case dismissed.

As they have before, Blanche and Bove argued that any continuation of the case would unconstitutionally impede Trump’s transition back to the White House. And he wrote that failing to toss the case immediately might trigger “the type of ‘factional strife’ that President Biden decried in yesterday’s blanket pardon announcement.”

“Burdening the Presidency with a biased prosecution by a local prosecutor would be not only unconstitutional, but also unbearably undemocratic to the people of this country who chose President Trump as their leader,” they wrote.

In addition to making specific arguments about why the case shouldn’t proceed in light of Trump’s election, the document is also somewhat of a catchall of Trump’s long-standing complaints about the prosecution and Bragg’s office, from Colangelo’s involvement to Bragg’s performance as district attorney to Merchan’s handling of the case, which Trump has repeatedly alleged was improper due to purported conflicts of interest.

The court filing presents the prosecution as a conspiracy against Trump, suggesting it sought to elicit false information from its star witness, former Trump fixer Michael Cohen, while also suppressing testimony from former Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg by persuading him to plead guilty to perjury in an unrelated case.

And though Bragg’s office has suggested Trump’s sentencing could be delayed until after he leaves office in January 2029, Trump’s lawyers deemed that an unacceptable solution, writing that “[w]ith respect to presidential immunity, it would be egregious and unlawful for this Court to hold the prospect of a 2029 sentencing over President Trump’s head while he continues his service to this Country.”

In one of the references to Biden’s pardon, Trump’s lawyers wrote, “As President Biden put it yesterday, ‘Enough is enough.’ This case, which should never have been brought, must now be dismissed.”

Bragg's office is due to file a response to Trump's arguments next week.