Judges to hear Trump's appeal against his 34-count hush money conviction in a Manhattan court on Thursday

Lawyers for U.S. President Donald Trump will appear in a Manhattan courtroom on Thursday to argue that his criminal conviction should be overturned. Two and a half years ago, a New York jury convicted Trump on 34 felony counts.

The hearing will take place before a five-judge panel of the First Department of the State Supreme Court's Appellate Division. To spare Trump the distinction of being the only U.S. president in history to be convicted of a crime, his lawyers will have to convince a majority of the panel that he was wrongfully convicted.

Trump's attorneys at the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell argue the case is the 'most politically charged prosecution in our Nation's history' and should be reversed. In a filing, they wrote that the district attorney, a Democrat, brought the charges in the middle of a contentious presidential election in which Trump was the leading Republican candidate, and that the charges were as unprecedented as their political context.

The oral argument will relitigate a central element 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 made by 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 business records in the first degree, one for each of the payments Trump made to reimburse his lawyer. Prosecutors say the records were falsified to conceal their true purpose.

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

Trump said during his sentencing, '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.'

In the appeal, Trump's attorneys have made a series of further arguments, including 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.

The appeal says the district attorney concocted a purported felony by stacking time-barred misdemeanors under a convoluted legal theory, targeting alleged conduct that has never been found to violate any New York law, and improperly obscured that theory until the charge conference. The case, the filing says, should never have seen the inside of a courtroom, let alone resulted in a conviction.

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 district attorney's filing says the criminal charges arose from the defendant's unofficial, nonpresidential conduct, as multiple courts have already found and the defendant now concedes. It adds that a mountain of evidence unaffected by any claim of official presidential immunity overwhelmingly established the defendant's guilt.