Trump Leverages SCOTUS Immunity Ruling To Attack His Hush-Money Conviction

A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.

The Other Shoe Just Dropped

In a new filing Thursday, former President Donald Trump launched a wholesale attack not just on his conviction in the New York hush money case but on the underlying indictment, too – relying heavily on the Supreme Court’s unprecedented ruling in his favor on presidential immunity.

You knew this was coming, but there was a jolt in reading the particulars of the motion. Perhaps it was the effect of seeing anew that the Supreme Court gifted Trump so many angles of attack by issuing such a broad, vague ruling and tacking on to it a newly invented evidentiary rule that benefits Trump and future lawless presidents in myriad ways.

It was the high court’s new evidentiary rule that evidence of official acts can’t be used in a criminal proceeding against the former president – ostensibly because it would deprive him of the benefits of the immunity protection the court bestowed on him – that opened the door for Trump now to challenge the underlying indictment.

“Because of the implications for the institution of the Presidency, the use of official-acts evidence was a structural error under the federal Constitution that tainted DANY’s grand jury proceedings as well as the trial,” Trump argued in the new filing.

Trump is asking the trial judge to dismiss the indictment and vacate the conviction. Most legal observers think the conviction will likely survive review in New York state, but the scope of the Supreme Court ruling on immunity means the high court will almost certainly get a chance to weigh in and is likely to take that chance. That was not the case, or at least was much more of a stretch, before the immunity ruling, when there were few if any real constitutional issues in the New York case that would have been a basis for Supreme Court intervention.

To reiterate, close observers recognized right off the bat that the immunity ruling posed a threat not just to the Jan. 6 case in DC and the RICO case in Georgia but also to the hush money conviction and the Mar-a-Lago case. Yesterday’s filing was evidence of those chickens coming home to roost.

The Supreme Court Is Gaslighting Us All

• Jesse Wegman: “At the close of one of the most consequential and least constitutional terms in the Supreme Court’s history, it’s hard to ignore one particularly offensive trend: the right-wing justices’ repeated and patronizing attempts to minimize the importance of their unprecedented decisions.”
• Roger Parloff: “[T]he SCOTUS majority in Trump v US contemptuously chided the bipartisan lower courts for trying to let justice be done before Trump has a chance to abuse power to derail it. They even purported to be acting expeditiously … though we are, right now, pointlessly counting 32 more days off the calendar for SCOTUS’s ruling to become final, because the court declined to make it immediate. (The pause permits the losing party to seek rehearing—inconceivable here as the Court well knows.)”

An Impossible Feat

As I suggested in yesterday’s Morning Memo, Joe Biden’s press conference to wrap up the NATO summit was a trap more than a potential escape route for the embattled president.

Despite a strong showing that effectively muted concerns that Biden had suffered a sudden and irreversible cognitive decline in recent months, the news coverage universally took on the bitter flavor of “he did fine but it won’t matter” – a hall of mirrors of political analysis that seems destined to be the surreal place American politics is going to spend the next few days, weeks, and maybe even months.

The one bit of good news yesterday for Biden was that a meeting of Democratic senators with Biden’s campaign triumvirate was not followed by a series of Senate defections. That number still stands at one.

Biden’s Shrinking Electoral College Map

The Biden campaign sent a memo to campaign staffers yesterday that amounted to a concession that the Electoral College map for the president has shrunk to the “blue wall” of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan, the Associated Press reports:

The fresh emphasis on the “blue wall” states by the campaign, which has heavily invested in other battlegrounds such as Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina and Georgia, acknowledges that the path to defeating Donald Trump in November is narrowing, even as the team insists the Sun Belt states are “not out of reach.”

Democratic political strategist Doug Sosnik cites the campaign memo as he reassess the current political map in a NYT op-ed out today. Sosnik paints a grim picture for Biden:

Unless the basic contours of the race change and some of the Sun Belt battleground states become more competitive (which is unlikely), Mr. Biden’s only viable path for winning is to carry Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Each of the three states poses particular challenges for Mr. Biden. Current polling shows him trailing Mr. Trump by as many as five points in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and more narrowly in Michigan.

I should add one note for the discerning reader: The Sosnik op-ed, while sound, also reads like part of the internal party drumbeat for Biden to exit the race. That’s not to denigrate the analysis just to heighten your awareness.

The McCain Precedent

Brian Beutler has a insightful callback to the desperate measure GOP nominee John McCain reached for in 2008 to try to change the trajectory of his losing campaign: Sarah Palin.

Quote Of The Day

It’s fucking awesome.

Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC), on seeing congressional Democrats swarmed by reporters this week and having to face uncomfortable questions about President Biden

The Looming Menace, Part I

TPM’s Josh Kovensky: What Viktor Orbán brought to Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago last night.

The Looming Menace, Part II

WaPo: “U.S. intelligence officials warned the German authorities earlier this year that Russia was plotting to assassinate the head of Europe’s biggest weapons producer, according to two Western officials, amid an escalating sabotage campaign by Moscow to raise the cost of Western support for Ukraine.”

From The ‘You Can’t Make This Up’ File

Via NBC News’ Frank Thorpe V:

Outside Sen Brown’s office this morning, his GOP opponent, Bernie Moreno, gaggles with reporters, saying, “I can tell you this, if I’m here, I will talk to you at any point in time, even take tough questions. Sherrod Brown won’t do that.”

He then immediately got a Q from @AndrewDesiderio about if his stance on abortion conflicts with the party platform.

Moreno: “We’re not here to talk about abortion.”

Outside Sen Brown’s office this morning, his GOP opponent, Bernie Moreno, gaggles with reporters, saying, “I can tell you this, if I'm here, I will talk to you at any point in time, even take tough questions. Sherrod Brown won't do that.”

He then immediately got a Q from… pic.twitter.com/FLp1epSvYf

— Frank Thorp V (@frankthorp) July 11, 2024

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