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Donald Trump has been ordered to appear for sentencing on January 10 in the New York “hush money” criminal case, days before he is inaugurated for his second term in the White House.
Justice Juan Merchan’s decision on Friday delivers a symbolic legal blow to Trump and sets the stage for a courtroom spectacle in lower Manhattan just weeks before the president-elect returns to the White House. However, the judge signalled in Friday’s order that Trump would not face jail time as a result of the conviction, and said that he could attend the sentencing hearing virtually if he preferred.
A spokesperson for Trump’s transition team said the order was “a direct violation of the Supreme Court’s immunity decision and other long-standing jurisprudence” and that “there should be no sentencing”.
“President Trump must be allowed to continue the presidential transition process and to execute the vital duties of the presidency, unobstructed by the remains of this or any remnants of the witch hunts,” said Steven Cheung. “President Trump will continue fighting against these hoaxes until they are all dead.”
The hush-money case is one of four criminal cases brought against Trump following his first term, and the only one to advance to trial. Last year, following a seven-week trial in New York state court, he was convicted on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in what prosecutors alleged was a scheme to buy the silence of a porn actor, Stormy Daniels, with who he had an affair. It was the first time a former president was convicted of a crime.
Sentencing has been repeatedly postponed as Trump mounted a comeback bid for the presidency, and again after he prevailed in November’s election against Kamala Harris.
Trump’s legal team had argued that the case should be dismissed in the wake of a US Supreme Court decision finding that presidents were entitled to broad legal immunity for their official acts. Prosecutors, meanwhile, wanted the judge to wait to sentence Trump until after his presidential term is over.
In his decision, Merchan said that the conduct at issue in the hush money case was not protected by presidential immunity. However, he acknowledged “that presidential immunity will likely attach once defendant takes his Oath of Office”.
Therefore, Merchan concluded, Trump should be sentenced before the January 20 inauguration — bringing “finality” to the case and allowing the president-elect to pursue further appeals.
Merchan stressed that he was not seeking to take the unprecedented step of ordering the incarceration of the president-elect.
“While this court as a matter of law must not make any determination on sentencing prior to giving the parties and defendant an opportunity to be heard, it seems proper at this juncture to make known the court’s inclination to not impose any sentence of incarceration, a sentence authorised by the conviction but one the People concede they no longer view as a practicable recommendation,” he wrote.
Rather, Merchan said he was inclined to impose a so-called unconditional discharge, which would essentially allow Trump to walk free and face no probation or fines.
Friday’s decision was the latest twist in Trump’s various criminal legal sagas, which have largely evaporated since his re-election. Jack Smith, the Department of Justice’s special counsel tasked with overseeing investigations into Trump, has already dropped two federal criminal cases — one involving alleged interference in the 2020 election, and another involving classified documents found at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate — citing a DoJ policy prohibiting the prosecution of sitting presidents.
The fourth case, brought in Georgia over an alleged conspiracy to interfere with the state’s election results in 2020, has been thrown into disarray after an appeals court disqualified the Fulton county district attorney who brought it.
Trump does remain enmeshed in civil litigation, however. He is on the hook for more than $450mn after he was found to have inflated the value of his assets to banks in order to extract favourable loan terms. He has also been ordered across two different cases to pay more than $88mn to writer E Jean Carroll, who claimed the president-elect sexually abused her in the 1990s and subsequently defamed her.
Trump is appealing against those civil judgments. A federal appeals court upheld one of the Carroll verdicts earlier this week.
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