NEW YORK — Former President Donald Trump is urging the judge who oversaw his Manhattan criminal trial to step aside, claiming in a legal filing that the judge has indirect ties to Vice President Kamala Harris and therefore an “actual conflict and appearances of impropriety.”
In a letter to the judge released on Thursday — two months after Trump was convicted of falsifying documents to hide a sex scandal — Trump’s lawyers said that the judge’s daughter “has a longstanding relationship with Harris,” who is the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee and Trump’s election opponent. Trump’s legal team cited the daughter’s “work for political campaigns” as a Democratic consultant, an argument that many ethics experts had previously rejected.
The letter is the former president’s latest long-shot bid to oust the judge, Juan M. Merchan, from the case. The judge, a former Republican now known as a moderate Democrat, refused Trump’s request last year to step aside. He cited a state advisory committee on judicial ethics that determined that his impartiality could not reasonably be questioned based on his daughter’s interests.
Before the trial, Trump also tried unsuccessfully to remove the judge, who declared on the first day of jury selection in April, “There is no agenda here” and “We want justice to be done.”
The new effort comes after Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records and before his sentencing next month.
Trump has asked Merchan to throw out the verdict in light of a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling granting him broad immunity for official actions he took while in the White House. The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, which brought the case, has argued that the Supreme Court decision had “no bearing on this prosecution” and urged the judge to uphold the jury’s verdict.
Merchan has promised to rule on Sept. 6. If he rejects Trump’s bid to toss out the conviction, he is set to impose the former president’s sentence on Sept. 18.
It is unclear how closely tied Merchan’s daughter, Loren Merchan, was to Harris. Cached pages from the website of Authentic Campaigns, a Democratic fundraising and marketing firm, listed Loren Merchan in January 2024 as president. Her biography on the website noted that she had managed media campaigns for Harris, Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Beto O’Rourke. Mike Nellis, the CEO of Authentic, declined to comment.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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