Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg opposes former President Donald Trump's third attempt to remove judge in hush money trial, court papers show

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg on Friday said he opposes former President Donald Trump’s third attempt to remove the judge assigned to his hush money trial, calling the effort "vexatious and frivolous."

The prosecutor’s letter comes a day after defense attorney Todd Blanche sent his own request to Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan asking him to step aside because of the "long-standing and extremely beneficial working relationship between Your Honor’s daughter and Vice President Kamala Harris."

In May, a jury convicted Trump on 34 counts of falsifying business records to hide reimbursements to his former fixer Michael Cohen who had paid off adult film star Stormy Daniels in exchange for her silence on an alleged sexual encounter with the former president. Prosecutors charge that Trump wanted to hide the information from the voting public ahead of the 2016 presidential race.

Merchan’s daughter, Loren Merchan, worked on the vice president’s 2020 presidential campaign and currently runs a Chicago-based political consulting firm, Authentic Campaigns, which has also represented other Democrats like Montana Sen. Jon Tester and California Sen. Adam Schiff.

Blanche framed his request against the backdrop of the 2024 presidential election now that Harris is the presumptive Democratic candidate.

Many of his points echo a letter that Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, wrote Thursday to the judge’s daughter requesting her company’s records.

"Experts have raised substantial concerns with Judge Merchan, your father, refusing to recuse himself from President Trump’s case despite your work on behalf of President Trump’s political adversaries and the financial benefit that your firm, Authentic Campaigns Inc., could receive from the prosecution and conviction," Jordan said in his letter.

Blanche also suggests the trial was politically motivated "by President Biden’s alarming decline."

After Biden announced on July 21he would end his reelection campaign, he threw his support behind his vice president.

"Harris immediately framed her candidacy with a specific false reference to this case as a contest of ‘prosecutor vs. convicted felon,’" Blanche said in his letter.

After the trial ended in May, Merchan ruled that a gag order on the president should remain, in part, through the sentencing due to a flood of death threats against Bragg and his staff. On Thursday, an appellate court upheld the decision to keep the order in place.

The remainder of the gag order, along with his daughter’s political work, is evidence of Merchan’s bias, Blanche wrote in his letter.

The defense lawyer charged that Authentic Campaigns runs "White dudes for Harris," a group that raised millions of dollars for the presidential hopeful after a series of celebrity-packed Zoom calls.

He cited Federal Election Commission  filings that show Authentic received $12 million from Democrat and progressive politicians and PACs since the beginning of the year. Jordan said the consulting firm earned $7 million from work it has done on behalf of Harris alone.

Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Matthew Colangelo, in his letter opposing the recusal, cited a May 2023 opinion from the New York State Advisory Committee on Judicial Ethics that said, "A relative's independent political activities do not provide a reasonable basis to question the judge's impartiality."

He called the Trump legal team’s argument a "regurgitated showing" that repeats arguments the appellate court already rejected regarding Merchan’s daughter benefiting from the Harris campaign.

"No amount of overheated, hyperbolic rhetoric can cure the fatal defects in defendant's ongoing effort to impugn the fairness of these proceedings and the impartiality of this court," Colangelo said in his letter. "The motion for recusal should be denied for a third time."

Merchan is expected to make a ruling on the issue.

Trump's sentencing on the hush money case is scheduled for Sept. 18.