NEW YORK – A blow to most defendants, Donald Trump turned his criminal conviction into a rallying cry. His supporters put “I’m voting for the criminal” on T-shirts, hats and lawn signs.

“The true verdict will be given by the people on November 5,” Trump proclaimed after his conviction in New York last spring on 34 counts of falsifying business records.

Now, just a week after Trump’s resounding election victory, a Manhattan judge is about to decide whether to uphold the silence verdict or throw it out because of a U.S. Supreme Court decision in July that granted presidents broad immunity from criminal proceedings.

Judge Juan M. Merchán has said he will issue a written opinion Tuesday on Trump’s request to vacate his conviction and order a new trial or dismiss the indictment entirely.

Merchan was expected to govern in September, but postponed it “to avoid any appearance” that he was trying to influence the election. His decision could be frozen again if Trump takes other steps to delay or end the case.

If the judge upholds the verdict, the case would be on track for sentencing on Nov. 26, although that sentence could change or disappear depending on appeals or other legal maneuvers.

Trump’s lawyers have been fighting for months to overturn his conviction, which involved efforts to conceal a $130,000 payment to porn actor Stormy Daniels, whose affair allegations threatened to disrupt his 2016 campaign.

Trump denies her claim, maintains he did nothing wrong and has denounced the verdict as a “rigged and shameful” result of a politically motivated “witch hunt” aimed at damaging his campaign.

The Supreme Court ruling grants former presidents immunity from prosecution for official acts (things they do as part of their job as president) and prohibits prosecutors from using evidence of official acts to try to prove that purely personal conduct violated the law. .

Trump was a private citizen (he was campaigning for president, but was not elected or sworn in) when his then-attorney Michael Cohen paid Daniels in October 2016.

But Trump was president when Cohen received the refund, and Cohen testified that they discussed the payment agreement in the Oval Office. Those reimbursements, jurors found, were falsely recorded in Trump’s records as legal expenses.

Trump’s lawyers maintain that the Manhattan district attorney’s office “tainted” the case with evidence — including testimony about Trump’s first term as president — that should not have been allowed.

Prosecutors maintain that the high court’s ruling “provides no basis for altering the jury’s verdict.” They said Trump’s conviction involved unofficial acts, personal conduct from which he is not immune.

The Supreme Court did not define an official act and left that to the lower courts. Nor did he clarify how his ruling – which arose from one of Trump’s two federal criminal cases – refers to state-level cases like Trump’s hush money prosecution.

“There are several murky aspects of the court’s ruling, but one that is particularly relevant to this case is the question of what qualifies as an official act,” said Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University. “And I think it’s extremely difficult to argue that this payment to this woman qualifies as an official act, for a number of fairly obvious reasons.”

Trump’s efforts to erase the verdict have taken on new urgency since his election, with a sentencing date approaching at the end of the month and possible punishments ranging from a fine or probation to up to four years in prison.

President-elects don’t typically enjoy the same legal protections as presidents, but Trump and his lawyers could try to leverage his status as former and future commander in chief into a sort of “get out of jail free” card.

One likely argument: Not only would Trump be saving himself from a possible prison sentence, he would also be saving the nation from the calamity of its leader behind bars, however remote that possibility may be.

“He’ll ask every court in the world to intervene if he can, including the Supreme Court, so that might slow things down a little bit,” said Syracuse University law professor David Driesen, author of the book “The Specter.” of the dictatorship: Judicial Qualification of the Presidential Power”.

At the same time, Trump has been trying again to move the case from state court to federal court, where he could also assert immunity. His attorneys have asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit to overturn a judge’s ruling that denied the transfer in September.

If Merchan orders a new trial, it seems unlikely that will happen while Trump is in office.

Trump’s lawyers argued in court papers that, given the Supreme Court’s ruling, jurors should not have been allowed to hear matters such as his conversations with then-White House communications director Hope Hicks, or the testimony of another assistant about their work practices.

Also prohibited, they said, was prosecutors’ use of Trump’s 2018 financial disclosure report, which he was required to submit as president. A footnote mentioned that Trump reimbursed Cohen in 2017 for unspecified expenses from the previous year.

Trump’s lawyers, Todd Blanche and Emil Bove, argued that prosecutors were trying to “assign a criminal motive” to some of Trump’s actions in office to “unfairly harm him.” For example, they wrote, prosecutors pushed the “dubious theory” that some of Trump’s 2018 tweets were part of a “pressure campaign” to prevent Cohen from turning on him.

The immunity decision “prevents investigation of those grounds,” Blanche and Bove wrote.

Prosecutors responded that the ruling does not apply to the evidence in question and that it is, in any case, “just a portion of the mountains of testimony and documentary evidence” the jury considered.