Trump’s lawyers say the hush money case has to be dropped now that Trump has won the election

Donald Trump’s lawyers told a judge that the Republican’s conviction for illegally hiding hush money payments to a porn star should be thrown out because he won the election and sending him to prison would be bad for the security of the government.

The lawyers for the Republican candidate for president asked New York State Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan in a letter sent on Tuesday and made public on Wednesday for permission to file a formal move by Dec. 20 outlining their reasons.

“Just as a sitting president is immune from any criminal process, so too is President Trump as President-elect,” they wrote.

Donald Trump, who is 78 years old, was supposed to be sentenced on November 26, but last week, at the request of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office, Merchan put a hold on the case.

Bragg’s office has said it will fight Trump’s attempt to throw out the case and suggested that it be put on hold until Trump finishes his four-year term as president, which starts on January 20. However, it did not say that it agreed with this idea.

Trump, who was president from 2017 to 2021, wants to run for a second term without any of the four criminal cases he has been involved in. Some of his opponents thought these cases would stop him from running for president again in 2024.

In May, the Republican Trump was found guilty of changing business records to hide the fact that his former lawyer Michael Cohen paid adult film star Stormy Daniels $130,000 to keep quiet about a sexual experience she says she had with Trump before the 2016 election. Trump denies the claim.

That was the first time that a U.S. president, living or dead, had been charged with or convicted of a crime.

Trump pleaded not guilty in the case, which he has long said was an attempt by Bragg, a Democrat, to meddle in his campaign for political reasons.

Trump’s lawyers wrote in a letter on Tuesday that continuing the case after he won the election would be “uniquely destabilizing” and could “hamstring the operation of the whole governmental apparatus.”

If you change business records, you could go to jail for up to four years. Before he was elected, experts said it was unlikely, but not impossible, that Trump would go to jail. Instead, they said he would probably get a fine or be put on probation.

Trump’s victory over Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris in the Nov. 5 election made the idea of giving him a jail or probation sentence even more politically difficult and unworkable, since it might have made it harder for him to do his job as president.

There were three more state and federal cases against Trump in 2023. One was about secret papers he kept after leaving office, and the other two were about his efforts to overturn his loss in the 2020 election.

In July, the papers case was thrown out by a federal judge in Florida.

Now, the Justice Department is thinking about how to end the criminal case that has to do with the election. Trump is also facing state criminal charges in Georgia for trying to get back the votes he lost in 2020, but the case is still not decided.

Donald Trump would not be able to stop the cases in New York or Georgia as president because they were brought in state courts. He could end the government cases with his Justice Department.