Donald Trump has filed a motion to dismiss the hush money case in which he was convicted due to his victory in the US presidential election.

In May, a New York jury found Mr Trump guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records to commit election fraud.

It was the first time a US president had been convicted of or charged with a criminal offence.

Mr Trump had tried to cover up “hush money” payments to a porn star in the days before the 2016 election.

When Stormy Daniels‘ claims of a sexual liaison threatened to upend his presidential campaign, Trump directed his lawyer to pay $130,000 (£102,000) to keep her quiet.

A judge delayed Mr Trump’s scheduled 26 November sentencing indefinitely last month to give him the chance to seek dismissal.

A dismissal would erase Mr Trump’s historic conviction, sparing him of a criminal record and possible prison sentence.

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The judge could also decide to uphold the verdict and proceed to sentencing, delay the case until Mr Trump leaves office, wait until a federal appeals court rules on Trump’s parallel effort to get the case moved out of state court or choose some other option.

The president-elect’s lawyers argue having the case loom over his four-year presidential term that begins on 20 January would cause “unconstitutional impediments” to his ability to govern.

Prosecutors have until 9 December to respond.

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The filing references the pardon Joe Biden issued to his son on Monday, in which the president said Hunter Biden was “unfairly prosecuted” on gun and tax charges.

Mr Trump’s lawyers said: “President Biden argued that ‘raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice’. These comments amounted to an extraordinary condemnation of President Biden’s own DOJ [department of justice]”.

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The Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg “has engaged in ‘precisely the type of political theatre’ that President Biden has condemned”, the filing added.

“This case is based on a contrived, defective, and unprecedented legal theory relating to 2017 entries in documents that were maintained hundreds of miles away from the White House where President Trump was running the country.”

The district attorney’s “disruptions to the institution of the presidency violate the presidential immunity doctrine because they threaten the functioning of the federal government,” the filing said.

Justice has been undermined by politics on both sides

Donald Trump has always maintained the legal cases against him were politically motivated and President Biden had weaponised the Justice system to seek to remove his political opponent. 

Regardless of whether or not that was true (there was never any evidence of any meddling by Biden), the perception was always of a Democratic Party effort to bring Trump down; to go after him harder than might be the case for an ordinary person.

America’s extraordinary system of politically affiliated prosecutors and politically appointed judges hardly helps. 

But until last Friday, the Trump team’s complaints of a politically driven legal witch-hunt were not sticking. 

Then Biden declared that he would pardon his own son for his gun and tax-related crimes because, Biden said, “raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice”.

With that sentence, Biden had seemingly undermined his central claim that the Justice Department is independent of politics.

Biden had, Trump’s team argued, issued an “extraordinary condemnation” of his own Department of Justice by admitting that it was capable of being “infected” by politics. 

Trump is arguing now that if American justice is capable of being driven to an unfair prosecution of the president’s son then it is equally capable of doing the same against him.

Juries of ordinary Americans concluded that both Donald Trump and Hunter Biden were guilty of the crimes they were accused of.  

Yet in today’s America, justice has been undermined by politics and process.

The prosecutors’ “ridiculous suggestion that they could simply resume proceedings after President Trump leaves office, more than a decade after they commenced their investigation in 2018, is not an option,” the filing claimed.

Mr Trump’s lawyers also claimed the case should be thrown out because of his “extraordinary service” to the US, adding that his “civil and financial contributions to this city and the nation are too numerous to count”.

The president-elect has said he intends to nominate the lawyers who wrote the filing – Todd Blanche and Emil Bove – to top jobs in the justice department, which they criticise in the documents.