Supreme Court Won’t Hear Long-Shot Challenge to Trump Hush Money Case

Missouri sought to sue New York under the court’s “original jurisdiction,” which sometimes allows suits between states to be brought directly to the justices.

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The Supreme Court’s brief order said that Missouri lacked standing to bring the claim.

The Supreme Court on Monday rejected an audacious lawsuit by Missouri that asked the justices to intervene in the hush money case in New York in which former President Donald J. Trump was convicted of falsifying business records.

Andrew Bailey, Missouri’s attorney general, asked the court to defer Mr. Trump’s sentencing, scheduled for Sept. 18, until after the election and to lift a gag order limiting what he can say.

The Supreme Court’s brief order did not lay out the court’s reasoning. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. said they would have let the state file the suit, but they did not express a view about whether it had merit.

Mr. Bailey told the justices that his “modest request imposes no harm on the state of New York, but it ensures that voters in Missouri and across America are able to make their voices heard this November without one state interfering with the ability of everybody else to hear a major-party candidate campaign.”

Much of Missouri’s proposed suit was devoted to what it said were legal shortcomings in and political motivations behind the case against Mr. Trump.

In response, Letitia James, New York’s attorney general, wrote that the suit was flawed in at least three ways. Missouri has not suffered the sort of injury that gave the state standing to sue, she wrote. New York was not a proper defendant, she added, as the case against Mr. Trump was brought by an elected district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, who had exercised independent discretion. And there were, she wrote, other forums in which the questions raised by Missouri can be adjudicated.

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