The New York judge who oversaw Donald Trump’s hush money criminal trial blasted the latest effort to have him step down from the case over alleged bias as being filled with “innuendo and mischaracterizations.”

Justice Juan Merchan denied the former president’s motion in a scathing ruling on Tuesday, saying his views on the arguments “should already be clear” from two earlier rulings. Trump, who was found guilty on 34 felony counts, is due to be sentenced Sept. 18 if his separate post-trial arguments about presidential immunity are also denied.

In his ruling, Merchan criticized Trump for including in his third recusal request fresh complaints about a gag order that remains in place against him in the case to protect the safety of prosecutors, describing the argument as “nothing more than an attempt to air grievances against this court’s rulings.”

Trump, the Republican nominee for the November presidential election, renewed his request for Merchan to step down after President Joe Biden ended his bid for reelection and Vice President Kamala Harris became his opponent. Trump argued the judge has a conflict of interest because his daughter partly owns a digital marketing and fundraising firm that worked on Harris’ 2019 White House bid.

Merchan had previously rejected Trump’s arguments on similar claims and a Manhattan interim appeals court upheld the rulings. In a statement, Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said Merchan was “beholden to not only Democrat partisan interests, but also to the glaring financial interests of an immediate family member.”

Merchan “has consistently and recklessly displayed his personal bias against President Trump throughout the case, including issuing an illegal, unconstitutional, and election-interfering gag order against the president and his campaign,” Cheung said. In his request to have Merchan step down, defense lawyer Todd Blanche argued the judge’s daughter stood to obtain “extensive financial, professional and personal benefits” from her relationship with Harris, a former California attorney general who has cast the Nov. 5 election as a choice between a former prosecutor and a “convicted felon.”

Prosecutors in the office of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg claimed Trump’s arguments were “frivolous” and said he could “not remotely establish” that Merchan had a “personal, substantial or pecuniary interest” in reaching a particular conclusion in the case.

A Manhattan jury on May 30 found Trump guilty on 34 counts of falsifying business records to conceal a hush money payment to a porn star on the eve of the 2016 election. Trump denies wrongdoing and claims without evidence that the case — along with three other criminal prosecutions — is part of a Democratic “witch hunt” to keep him from regaining the White House.

In addition to the recusal request, Trump, 78, has separately sought to have the verdict tossed and the indictment dismissed after the U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling granting presidents broad immunity from prosecution. Bragg has argued the landmark decision shouldn’t affect the hush money case because it revolves around conduct that happened before he was elected.