The Daily Fuckup

Donald Trump’s Manhattan hush-money case was already headed into a new phase by June 17, 2024, with post-trial motions and sentencing questions still unresolved and the defense looking for any opening that could slow the case down. At that point, the Supreme Court had not yet ruled on presidential immunity, so the question in New York was not what that decision meant for the case, but whether anything in the broader Trump litigation would later spill into it.

The Manhattan prosecution itself remained a state case built around conduct prosecutors treated as personal rather than official: payments, bookkeeping entries and the business-records charges a jury had already convicted Trump on earlier that spring. The defense had been arguing that the case was flawed from the start, but on June 17 the legal fight was still about the ordinary next steps after a felony verdict, not the effect of a Supreme Court opinion that had not yet been issued.

That matters because the calendar controls the story. The immunity ruling did not come until July 1, 2024. Any claim that it had already changed the Manhattan case on June 17 would be backwards. What was true on the edition date was simpler: Trump’s conviction was still in place, the trial court still had to deal with post-verdict filings, and the defense still had every incentive to preserve objections for later review.

The case would soon pick up a new argument once the Supreme Court spoke. But on June 17, the legal picture was still the old one: a state conviction waiting on the next procedural fight, with no immunity ruling yet on the books and no court order tying the two cases together.