Federal Judge Rejects Trump's Third Attempt to Move Hush-Money Case Out of State Court
A federal judge has rejected Donald Trump's third attempt to move his criminal hush-money case from New York state court to federal court, ruling that the president's arguments were "neither new nor legally sufficient." US District Judge Alvin Hellerstein issued the decision on August 28, 2026, with the ruling reported across multiple outlets including The Washington Post, PBS NewsHour, and CNBC.
Hellerstein also denied Trump's effort to overturn the underlying conviction, ruling that Trump had waited too long to bring the challenge. The decision is the latest in a series of rulings against Trump's repeated attempts to move the case out of state court.
At the center of the dispute is Trump's argument that a 2024 Supreme Court decision expanding presidential immunity should shield him from the conviction. Presidential immunity is a legal doctrine that protects a sitting or former president from being prosecuted for certain official acts carried out while in office. Hellerstein rejected that reasoning directly. "Paying hush money to an adult film star or engaging in a cover-up of an embarrassment are not subsumed in presidential immunity," he wrote. The ruling also pushed back on any suggestion that Hellerstein would simply go along with a prior appellate decision. "Federal district courts are not certifying clerks," the judge wrote.
The case traces back to a $130,000 payment Trump allegedly made through his fixer Michael Cohen to adult film star Stormy Daniels, who claimed an affair with Trump while he was married. Prosecutors argued the payment was designed to buy Daniels's silence and avoid negative attention during his 2016 presidential bid. In 2024, a New York City jury convicted Trump on 34 counts of falsifying business records, making him the first US president convicted of a crime. In New York, falsifying business records is normally a misdemeanor — a lower-level offense — but can be charged as a felony, a more serious category, when it is committed in service of another crime. Judge Juan Merchan sentenced Trump to an unconditional discharge on January 10, 2025, meaning no jail time or financial penalty, though the felony convictions remained on his record.
The August 28 ruling followed a November 2025 directive from the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals, which ordered Hellerstein to reconsider the case in light of the Supreme Court's immunity decision. An appellate court is a higher court that reviews decisions made by lower courts. The 2nd Circuit did not instruct Hellerstein on how to rule, leaving the question of whether presidential immunity extended to the conduct at issue for the district judge to determine.
Trump's legal team responded swiftly, announcing it would appeal Hellerstein's decision and denouncing the judgment as "baseless and lawless." In a statement, the team said: "President Trump will be filing a powerful appeal, and will continue defeating Democrat weaponization at every turn."
The hush-money case is the only one of four indictments Trump faced in 2023 to have reached trial. The other cases, involving classified documents and 2020 election interference, were dropped after Trump won re-election in 2024.
The broader context here is one of procedural exhaustion. Hellerstein's language throughout the ruling signals impatience with arguments his court has now rejected three times, and his explicit refusal to function as a "certifying clerk" for the appellate court underscores that district judges retain independent judgment even when directed to reconsider a case. The 2nd Circuit's remand — the act of sending a case back to a lower court — left the analytical work entirely to Hellerstein, and he performed it unambiguously.
Trump's legal team now returns to the 2nd Circuit, the same court that sent the case back to Hellerstein in November. The appeal will test whether the appellate panel is willing to engage with Hellerstein's immunity reasoning on the merits or whether it will find procedural grounds, such as the timing of Trump's challenge, sufficient to uphold the decision without reaching the constitutional question. Either path keeps the conviction on Trump's record for the foreseeable future, and the Supreme Court's immunity precedent, which Trump's team has leveraged across multiple legal fronts, meets its clearest judicial resistance here: a federal district judge drawing a bright line between official presidential acts and personal conduct aimed at influencing an election.
