Opinion: Why the hush money trial judge was right | CNN

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

55% : In doing so, the court noted an important acknowledgment by Trump: He "concedes -- consistent with the position of the Department of Justice -- that state grand juries are free to investigate a sitting President with an eye toward charging him after the completion of his term.
54% : Trump easily could have claimed immunity in the hush money payments case when he filed his omnibus pre-trial motions with Merchan last September.
53% : Trump recognizes this point when he asks the US Supreme Court for immunity only "for a President's official acts."
49% : In the absence of good cause for Trump's waiting until March 7, the judge ruled appropriately.
44% : Yet this was not a claim that Trump only recently discovered.
42% : Trump filed his claim for immunity on March 7, less than three weeks before the scheduled trial date at the time.
39% : "In trying to delay his impending trial, Trump invoked the recent ballot disqualification decision by the Supreme Court to suggest that it overrides the standard immunity analysis.
34% : Second, in an important way, it is preferable that Trump be held accountable for alleged crimes by state prosecutors than by federal prosecutors.
33% : According to the judge, Trump waited too long to raise his claim of immunity.
33% : Even if Trump had filed his motion in September, his immunity claim faced other serious hurdles.
32% : Most importantly, a third Supreme Court case addressed a state court proceeding against Trump for his pre-presidential conduct.
31% : But as the DC Circuit observed, Trump misreads the Constitution.
27% : While the Supreme Court has not yet weighed in on immunity from criminal charges for former presidents, it has addressed related questions in ways that support rejection of immunity for Trump.
26% : Trump tried to block the subpoena, arguing that "a sitting President enjoys absolute immunity from state criminal process," and the court rejected the claim of absolute immunity.
25% : But Trump is being prosecuted for conduct about a private matter that took place before he became president -- the alleged hush money payments to Stormy Daniels so she would not disclose their intimate relationship.
25% : Maybe Trump has temporary immunity from prosecution.
24% : "Trump, therefore, can't actually believe he's completely immune from prosecution.
23% : The conflicts of interest concerns would not apply to state prosecutions of Trump (nor would they apply to federal prosecutions after Election Day).
21% : First, the court's concern in Trump v. Anderson applied to the role of states in regulating a candidate's access to the ballot for national offices, and that concern is not implicated at all by Trump's prosecution.
14% : In Trump v. Vance, the court considered the propriety of a criminal subpoena served on Trump's accounting firm.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.