NEW YORK — The judge was not moved.
For the third time, United States District Judge Alvin Hellerstein rejected Donald Trump’s petition to transfer his New York criminal hush-money case to federal court — a legal maneuver Trump has pursued since his 2024 conviction in the hope that a federal venue would grant him immunity protections unavailable in state proceedings. Hellerstein’s ruling, issued Friday, was characteristically blunt: an affair is not within the outer perimeter of a president’s official responsibilities.
The phrase echoed through decades of American immunity jurisprudence before landing against Trump’s central argument. His legal team had insisted that because some evidence in the case touched on conduct during his first term in office, the charges were federally flavored enough to warrant removal. Hellerstein was unmoved. What those discussions involved, he wrote, was hush-money paid to conceal the president’s relationship with an adult film actress — and no reading of presidential authority, however expansive, reached that conduct, as Al Jazeera reported.
Trump was convicted in May 2024 on all 34 counts of falsifying business records, becoming the first sitting or former United States president convicted of a felony. The case centered on a $130,000 payment arranged by his then-fixer Michael Cohen to Stormy Daniels, whose legal name is Stephanie Clifford, in the weeks before the 2016 presidential election. The records Trump allegedly falsified described Cohen’s reimbursement as legal fees, obscuring the payment’s true purpose. Jurors returned a guilty verdict on all counts.
Sentencing, almost a year after conviction, produced an unusual outcome. In January 2025, Judge Juan Merchan imposed an unconditional discharge — no prison time, no fine, no probation. The convictions, however, remained intact on Trump’s record. Trump responded by pursuing removal to federal court, a path that, if successful, would have allowed his attorneys to argue for dismissal under immunity provisions state courts cannot consider.
Hellerstein rejected the transfer petition twice before Friday. In each instance his reasoning held: the hush-money case is a state prosecution of state crimes, and the involvement of presidential-era communications does not transform it into federal business.
The legal argument Trump’s team assembled for the third attempt rested on the Supreme Court’s July 2024 decision in Trump v. United States, which established that former presidents enjoy at least presumptive immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts. EH previously covered the Supreme Court immunity ruling and its contested scope when it was issued. The court’s own opinion acknowledged that immunity attaches to official, not personal, conduct. Hellerstein applied that line precisely: hush-money arrangements made with a film actress do not constitute official acts. A cover-up of a personal affair, whatever form it takes, cannot inherit presidential protection.
Trump’s attorneys, following the ruling, called it “baseless and lawless” and announced plans to file what they described as a powerful appeal. The case moves next to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, which will confront the same threshold question Hellerstein has now answered three times running.
The defeat arrives in a broader legal context that has not favored Trump. His attempt to erase the E. Jean Carroll sexual abuse verdict failed permanently after the Supreme Court rejected his rehearing petition earlier this month, closing every avenue of appeal on that case. Carroll’s $5 million judgment, reached by nine jurors in under three hours, cannot now be challenged in any court.
The hush-money case follows a different track. Unconditional discharge means no sentence was served, but the felony convictions remain on record. Whether the Second Circuit reverses Hellerstein — or whether the Supreme Court eventually agrees to hear a further appeal — is the open question the ruling leaves behind. No court has yet accepted the argument that concealing a payment to an adult film actress qualifies as the exercise of official presidential power.
What the law has not fully settled is where the immunity doctrine ends when presidential-era conduct is invoked to shield personal behavior. The Supreme Court’s 2024 framework left that boundary to be drawn case by case in the lower courts. Hellerstein has drawn it three times in the same direction, and each ruling has been more direct than the last.
The attorney who defended Trump at the Manhattan trial, Todd Blanche, now serves as acting attorney general. EH followed Blanche’s path from hush-money defense lawyer to the nation’s chief law-enforcement post when Trump submitted the nomination to the Senate earlier this year. Blanche made no public statement Friday about a ruling in the case where he once sat beside the defendant.
The Second Circuit is not expected to hear arguments before late 2026. Whatever it decides, Trump’s legal team has signaled it will pursue the immunity question as high as the courts will allow. The precedent forming along the way — that personal misconduct does not acquire presidential character simply because it occurred near the exercise of official duties — has held across three rounds of argument in the same courtroom.
Hellerstein’s answer has not changed.
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