Trying to expand even wider the Supreme Court’s new ruling creating broad legal immunity for Presidents who break the law, Donald Trump’s lawyers have asked a state judge in New York to overturn his 34 guilty verdicts and to forbid any new trial.

That is the only case so far to result in convictions of the former President, but the same plea is expected to be made in all of his criminal prosecutions.  The Trump team, in its new filing, offered a brief hint that it is also likely to use the immunity decision to challenge a federal jury’s damages award based on a woman’s claim of sexual assault – the E. Jean Carroll case, now on appeal.

Although Chief Justice John Roberts had insisted that the Court’s July 1 decision in Trump v. United States created only “limited” immunity, the ruling left broad gaps on what it could mean when applied in an actual trial, and the Trump team sought to fill all of those gaps to favor him.

The Trump filing in state court, made public Friday, is to be answered by New York state prosecutors on July 24.  The state trial judge, Juan M. Merchan, has promised a decision by September 6.  Any sentencing of Trump for the New York convictions has been put off until September 18; sentence will be imposed only if the case remains alive then.

Although the New York case arose out of events that began to unfold before Trump was President, during his 2016 election campaign, the scheme to complete the payoff of an adult-firm star to keep quiet a sex scandal involving Trump was not completed until Trump was in the White House.  But that period is the direct focus of Trump’s new immunity challenge: the Supreme Court ruling would have no bearing on a candidate, not yet President.

At Trump’s trial, two of the most important witnesses – long-time Trump lawyer and “fixer,” Michael Cohen, and former Trump communications director Hope Hicks – were crucial witnesses, telling the jury how the “hush money” scheme worked and, especially, telling the jury about the direct role that they said Trump had.

Those two and the evidence they gave are the most important focus of Trump’s new challenge.  Everything the two of them said or did, after Trump was President, amounted to “official” acts of the President, related to his “core” duties in office, the Trump team contended.  Thus, the filing claimed, use of that evidence violated his immunity and should never have been permitted.

Immunity, under the Supreme Court ruling, is “absolute” if a criminal charge is based on the use of “core” official powers of the Presidency.  The ruling, though, also said that the immunity might be somewhat narrower and might be overcome by prosecutors if the challenged actions were still official, but did not involve “core” powers.  The decision, though, gave only sketchy definitions of how to classify evidence as official, or not.

The ruling specified that trial judges must sort out what evidence was based on official action, or not, and declared that this sorting must be done before a trial even could start.  That did not happen in the New York case, although Trump did try – unsuccessfully – to claim immunity to the New York prosecution.  His lawyers had made that attempt weeks before the Supreme Court decision would emerge.  With that ruling available, his team moved swiftly to exploit it, and they did so first in the New York case.

Much of the 52 pages of legal argument filed Friday is focused on a recounting of the evidence and why, in the Trump view, it all related to official duty, but the filing made these separate legal points:

• Because the trial went ahead before his immunity was decided, the sorting function mandated by the Supreme Court ruling did not occur, so the trial was constitutionally flawed and the verdicts cannot stand.
• Even if some of the evidence was not tied to “core” official duties, prosecutors forfeited the right to try to overcome immunity to its use at the trial because they failed to do so before the trial. Trump tried to get immunity before the trial, so it was not his fault, but that of prosecutors, that the sorting never happened.
• Trump’s use of his social media account on Twitter, and his various telephone calls, to talk about the “hush money” scheme were all related to his “core” functions as a President communicating with the nation, so that evidence violated immunity and was out of bounds.
• Since the New York case occurred in state court, the prosecutors’ use of evidence for which Trump had immunity was unconstitutional because the Supreme Court decision is “the law of the land” and thus is supreme over state trial procedures.
• State prosecutors also used evidence about Trump’s use of official presidential powers in persuading a state grand jury to issue the 34 charges against him, so all of those charges were invalid and must be dismissed, and could not be the basis of a new trial.
• The use of immunized evidence in a criminal trial can never be allowed, on the theory that the jury would have reached a guilty verdict without it, because that is a basic constitutional violation that can never be treated as legally harmless.

If Judge Merchan were to accept in full the Trump team’s version of what the Supreme Court decision means, that probably would completely undermine the jury verdicts.  A starting point for salvaging the finding of guilt, though, could be to focus on Chief Justice Roberts’ firm insistence that the Court did not intend to put Presidents completely “above the law.”  Roberts made that point in answering the dissenting Justices’ arguments that the ruling swept very broadly.

Prosecutors had focused their case on charges that Trump illegally falsified business records dealing with the “hush money” scheme and the payments, and a charge that this falsity was a serious crime because it was used to violate state or federal election laws.  A good deal of the evidence came from the time when Trump was a candidate, but a good deal of it also came from the time after he began serving as President.  The immunity would only apply to the latter.  Can the judge separate the two?

While the new Trump document is a scathing critique of all of Michael Cohen’s testimony, repeatedly referring to him as a “serial perjurer,” the filing does not challenge some of the most damaging evidence that came out at the trial, particularly the testimony of the adult-magazine publisher who helped arrange for stories – even entirely made-up stories – to support Trump’s election campaign, leading to the “hush money” scheme, and the testimony of the adult-film star, Stormy Daniels, about the sexual encounter she claimed to have had with Trump.

If the trial judge does find a way to keep some or all of the verdicts intact, Trump would surely appeal to higher state courts and maybe ultimately return to the Supreme Court.  If the case were scuttled altogether, prosecutors might attempt an appeal of their own.  A decision to erase the verdicts probably would not be the equivalent of a jury finding that Trump was innocent, and only such a finding would bar a new trial under a theory of “double jeopardy” in violation of the Constitution’s Fifth Amendment.

These legal developments are occurring outside of this year’s presidential campaign and on the eve of the Republican Party’s presidential nominating convention next week in Milwaukee.  If the New York verdicts have had any negative effect on Trump’s campaign for the nomination, the fact that the verdicts are now in doubt might take some of the political sting out of the fact that he is a convicted felon.

Had the Supreme Court not issued the decision that it did, Trump might have appeared before the GOP conviction as a felon with a sentence, a fine or even prison time.  Sentencing on the verdicts had been set for last Thursday, but is now postponed until mid-September – if it occurs at all.

Meanwhile, the legal saga over Trump’s plea for immunity will continue to unfold in the criminal case in Florida, a prosecution involving 40 charges over the former President’s handling of sensitive national security documents at his private club, Mar-a-Lago.  New legal briefs on the meaning of the Supreme Court decision are likely to be ordered there.

Other criminal cases against him, in Washington, D.C., and Atlanta, are currently on hold in the courts.  It was the case in Washington that led to the Court’s immunity decision, but that case has not yet been returned to the trial court for the next steps.