the appeal process should be fun

Trump’s attorney Todd Blanche told CNN Thursday night that Trump’s legal team plans to file motions challenging the verdict before formally appealing the case, noting they will “vigorously fight” and file motions challenging “things that happened in the trial that we think just made the trial unfair.”

If those fail to affect Trump’s guilty verdict at all, then “as soon as we can appeal, we will,” Blanche said, suggesting they could argue that the timing and location of the trial in Manhattan were unfair to Trump and the pre-trial publicity about the case “made it very difficult” for the jury to “evaluate the evidence … independent of what they knew coming in.”

Trump will have 30 days after he’s sentenced on July 11 to file a notice of appeal—which just says he intends to appeal the case—and then six months to file a full appeal, meaning the appeals process might not have even gotten fully underway by the November election, let alone completed.

He’ll appeal the verdict first to an intermediate appellate court, the First Judicial Department of New York’s Appellate Division, and if that fails, he can then ask New York’s highest court, the Court of Appeals, to take up the case—followed by the U.S. Supreme Court, if necessary—though neither of those higher courts are obligated to hear the case.