Donald Trump has assembled his most illustrious legal team yet.
In court Wednesday morning, he’s expected to have in his corner one of the most prominent law firms in the country.
The attorneys aren’t litigating on behalf of the nation’s interests, but rather to defend Trump personally. They are scheduled to assemble in a 17th-floor Manhattan courtroom to argue over an appeal in his 34-count criminal conviction for falsifying business records in order to cover up hush money payments to Stormy Daniels.
The hearing marks the courtroom debut of Trump’s representation by Sullivan & Cromwell, a 146-year-old Big Law firm that made $2 billion in revenue last year. The firm, whose highly paid lawyers have represented business titans like OpenAI in its partnership with Microsoft and Discover in its merger with CapitalOne, joined the president’s case in January.
Wednesday’s oral argument focuses on a single narrow issue: Which court should listen to the rest of the appeal?
The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office brought the case against Trump in New York County criminal court, the usual venue for cases brought by the office.
Appeals for cases tried there are typically heard in the New York State Appellate Division. Trump’s lawyers want the case to play out in federal court instead.
The federal arena would give the lawyers a smoother path to bringing additional appeals to the US Supreme Court, which previously gutted a separate criminal case against Trump over his attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
A federal judge, US District Judge Alvin Hellerstein, had previously swatted down several attempts to move the case’s proceedings to federal court. Wednesday’s planned oral arguments, in the federal Second Circuit Court of Appeals, are over whether Hellerstein wrongly ruled against Trump when he tried to move the venue after the trial concluded, but before he was sentenced.
Trump’s team has argued that federal courts are the appropriate forum to hear additional appeals, which they say will focus on the US Supreme Court ruling that granted sweeping immunity powers to presidents. That ruling — which was handed down after Trump’s Manhattan criminal trial concluded — would have forbidden much of the evidence from coming into the case in the first place.
The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office argues that it has painstakingly distinguished between witness testimony that was personal from evidence that was related to Trump’s role as president, and that presidential immunity should not apply.
In May — with Trump now president again — the Justice Department weighed in. It argued in a brief that the law requires the case to play out in federal courts because Trump’s defenses rely on his position as a federal employee.
Sullivan & Cromwell is bringing heavyweights to the case. Its cochair Robert Giuffra signed onto the appeal in January, and later also agreed to represent him in the appeal for his $500 million civil fraud judgement in a case brought by the New York attorney general.
Another Sullivan & Cromwell lawyer, Jeffrey Wall, is expected to argue the criminal appeal in court Wednesday. Wall briefly served as Acting Solicitor General in Trump’s first term and has clerked for US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
The other Sullivan & Cromwell lawyers representing Trump in the appeal — James McDonald, Morgan Ratner, and Matthew A. Schwartz — are also all former US Supreme Court clerks.
The Trump lawyers who represented Trump during his trial, Todd Blanche and Emil Bove, have since been appointed to top positions in the Justice Department. Bove is being considered for a lifetime appointment in the Third Circuit Court of Appeals.
Overturning the conviction would help Trump clear a stain on his rap sheet, and it gives him an opportunity to renew long-standing complaints that prosecutors targeted him for political reasons.
And it also matters for his businesses: The conviction could result in the revocation of the liquor licenses at the Trump Organization’s New Jersey properties.
Last year, state regulators began a process to pull those licenses.
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