President-elect Trump is seeking to block his hush-money sentencing set for Friday, arguing that the trial judge wrongly scheduled it before the president-elect’s return to the White House. Trump lawyers asked Justice Juan Merchan to put all proceedings on hold while the president-elect pursues appeals of recent rulings, the Wall Street Journal reports. The lawyers planned to ask a state appeals court to intervene.
“Forcing the President to defend a criminal case—especially at a sentencing hearing ten days before he is due to become President again,” violates Trump’s presidential immunity, his lawyers wrote. Last week, Merchan scheduled the sentencing but indicated Trump wouldn’t be jailed. Merchan signaled in a written decision that he’d sentence Trump to what’s known as an unconditional discharge, in which a conviction stands but the case is closed without jail time, a fine or probation. Rejecting Trump’s plea to dismiss the verdict and throw out the case on presidential immunity grounds and because of his impending second term, Merchan wrote that only “bringing finality to this matter” would serve the interests of justice, the Associated Press reports. Merchan said he sought to balance Trump’s ability to govern, “unencumbered” by the case, against other interests: the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity and the public’s expectation “that all are equal and no one is above the law,” and the importance of respecting a jury verdict. “This court is simply not persuaded that the first factor outweighs the others at this stage of the proceeding,” Merchan wrote.
Trump takes office Jan. 20 as the first former president to be convicted of a crime and the first convicted criminal to be elected to the office. He was found guilty in May of 34 counts of falsifying business records, a a verdict he called the “rigged, disgraceful” result of a “witch hunt” pursued by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. The charges involved a scheme to hide a hush money payment to porn actress Stormy Daniels in near the end of Trump’s 2016 campaign. The payout was made to keep her from publicizing claims she’d had sex with the married Trump years earlier. He says that her story is false and that he did nothing wrong.
Prosecutors also proposed closing the case while formally noting both his conviction and his undecided appeal, an idea drawn from what some courts do when criminal defendants die while appealing their cases.
Merchan ruled that Trump’s status as president-elect does not afford him the same immunity as a sitting president. Dismissing the case would be “drastic” and would “undermine the Rule of Law in immeasurable ways,” Merchan wrote. Trump can appeal the conviction after he is sentenced.
Comments