Appeals court weighs Trump's challenge to 2024 criminal hush money conviction

Two and a half years after a New York jury convicted Donald Trump of 34 felony counts, lawyers for the president are set to appear in a Manhattan courtroom to argue the case be overturned. 

Trump's attorneys at the white shoe law firm Sullivan & Cromwell argue the case is the "most politically charged prosecution in our Nation's history" and should be reversed.

"The DA, a Democrat, brought those charges in the middle of a contentious Presidential election in which President Trump was the leading Republican candidate. These charges against President Trump were as unprecedented as their political context," Trump's lawyers wrote in a filing at the First Department of the State Supreme Court's Appellate Division.

On Thursday, they'll have to convince a majority of a five-judge panel that Trump was wrongfully convicted to spare him the distinction of being the only U.S. president in history to be convicted of a crime. 

The oral argument will relitigate one of the central elements of Trump's presidential comeback in 2024. For six weeks that spring, Trump -- then the presumptive Republican nominee -- was effectively stuck in a Manhattan courtroom as prosecutors alleged a scheme to conceal a $130,000 hush money payment from his former lawyer to adult film actress Stormy Daniels ahead of the 2016 presidential election.

A jury convicted Trump on 34 criminal counts of falsifying bushes records in the first degree -- one for each of the payments Trump made to reimburse his lawyer, which prosecutors say were falsified to conceal their true purpose. 

After Trump won the 2024 presidential election, he was sentenced to an unconditional discharge -- due to the extraordinary circumstances of him being days away from his inauguration -- and later made his lead defense attorney from that trial, Todd Blanche, the attorney general of the United States. 

"It's been a political witch hunt. It was done to damage my reputation so that I'd lose the election, and obviously that didn't work," Trump said during his sentencing. 

Trump's attorneys have made a series of arguments to appeal the conviction, including alleging that the judge should have recused himself and that part of the trial should have been protected by presidential immunity. They also argue that prosecutors abused New York law to target Trump.  

"Targeting alleged conduct that has never been found to violate any New York law, the DA concocted a purported felony by stacking time-barred misdemeanors under a convoluted legal theory, which the DA then improperly obscured until the charge conference. This case should never have seen the inside of a courtroom, let alone resulted in a conviction," the appeal said.

Lawyers for the Manhattan district attorney argue that Trump was convicted of a crime regularly prosecuted in New York, and that presidential immunity has no place covering the alleged conduct. 

"The criminal charges here arose from defendant's unofficial, nonpresidential conduct -- as multiple courts have already found, and defendant now concedes. Defendant complains that the immunity doctrine was violated because the People introduced evidence of official acts during the trial, but he is wrong," the district attorney's filing said, noting that "a mountain of evidence unaffected by any claim of official presidential immunity overwhelmingly established defendant's guilt."