NEW YORK (AP) — In an extraordinary turn, a judge Friday set President-elect Donald Trump’s sentencing in his hush money case for Jan. 10 — little over a week before he’s due to return to the White House — but indicated he wouldn’t be jailed.
The development nevertheless leaves Trump on course to be the first president to take office convicted of felony crimes.
Judge Juan M. Merchan, who presided over Trump’s trial, signaled in a written decision that he’d sentence the former and future president to what’s known as an unconditional discharge, in which a case is closed without jail time, a fine or probation. Trump can appear virtually for sentencing, if he chooses.
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Merchan wrote that he sought to balance competing interests: Trump’s ability to govern “unencumbered” by the case, the U.S. Supreme Court’s July ruling on presidential immunity, the public’s expectation “that all are equal and no one is above the Iaw,” 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 in an 18-page decision.
He rejected Trump’s push to dismiss the verdict and throw out the case on presidential immunity grounds and because of his impending second term. The judge said that he found no legal impediment to sentencing Trump and indeed deemed it “incumbent” on the court to carry out the proceeding before Inauguration Day, Jan. 20.
“Only by bringing finality to this matter” will the interests of justice be served, Merchan wrote.
Trump communications director Steven Cheung reiterated that the case, which Trump has long described as illegitimate, should be dismissed outright.
“There should be no sentencing, and President Trump will continue fighting against these hoaxes until they are all dead,” Cheung said in a statement. He didn’t elaborate on Trump’s potential next legal moves.
Former Manhattan Judge Diane Kiesel said the ruling can’t be appealed under New York law, but Trump nonetheless might try to appeal it. In any event, he can appeal his conviction, a step that can’t be taken until he is sentenced.
“I’m a little curious as to why it took this long, but I don’t want to be critical of the judge over that because I have no idea what his other caseload looks like and I know this is something that he wanted to make sure he got right because the minute Mr. Trump is sentenced, everybody is going to be running up to the appellate division,” Kiesel said.
Trump was convicted in May of 34 counts of falsifying business records. They involved an alleged scheme to hide a hush money payment to porn actor Stormy Daniels in the last weeks of Trump’s first campaign in 2016. 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.
After Trump’s Nov. 5 election, Merchan halted proceedings and indefinitely postponed the sentencing so the defense and prosecution could weigh in on the future of the case.
Trump’s lawyers urged Merchan to toss it. They said it would otherwise pose unconstitutional “disruptions” to the incoming president’s ability to run the country.
Prosecutors acknowledged there should be some accommodation for his upcoming presidency, but they insisted the conviction should stand.
They suggested various options, such as freezing the case during his term or guaranteeing him a no-jail sentence. They also proposed closing the case while formally noting both his conviction and his undecided appeal — a novel idea drawn from what some state courts do when criminal defendants die while appealing their cases.
Merchan ruled that Trump’s current status as president-elect does not afford him the same immunity as a sitting president. Setting the verdict aside and dismissing the case would be a “drastic” step and would “undermine the Rule of Law in immeasurable ways,” Merchan wrote. He opined that it wouldn’t address the Supreme Court’s concerns about presidential immunity, either.
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.
His conviction left the 78-year-old facing the possibility of punishment ranging from a fine or probation to up to four years in prison.
The case centered on how Trump accounted for reimbursing his personal attorney for the Daniels payment.
The lawyer, Michael Cohen, fronted the money. He later recouped it through a series of payments that Trump’s company logged as legal expenses. Trump, by then in the White House, signed most of the checks himself.
Prosecutors said the designation was meant to cloak the true purpose of the payments and help cover up a broader effort to keep voters from hearing unflattering claims about the Republican during his first campaign.
Trump said that Cohen was legitimately paid for legal services, and that Daniels’ story was suppressed to avoid embarrassing Trump’s family, not to influence the electorate.
Trump was a private citizen — campaigning for president, but neither elected nor sworn in — when Cohen paid Daniels in October 2016. He was president when Cohen was reimbursed, and Cohen testified that they discussed the repayment arrangement in the Oval Office.
Trump, a Republican, has decried the verdict as the “rigged, disgraceful” result of a “witch hunt” pursued by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, a Democrat.
Before Trump’s November election, his lawyers sought to reverse his conviction for a different reason: the Supreme Court’s immunity decision, which gave presidents broad protection from criminal prosecution.
The Trump hush money attorneys contended that the jury got some evidence that should have been shielded by presidential immunity. Merchan later rejected that argument, but in the meantime, the election raised new issues.
While urging Merchan to nix the conviction, Trump also sought to move the case to federal court, where he could also assert immunity. A federal judge repeatedly said no, but Trump appealed.
The hush money case was the only one of Trump’s four criminal indictments to go to trial.
Since the election, special counsel Jack Smith has ended his two federal cases. One pertained to Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss; the other alleged he hoarded classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate.
A separate, state-level election interference case in Georgia is in limbo after an appeals court removed prosecutor Fani Willis from the case.
Trump’s lawyers argued that Smith’s decision to dismiss the federal indictments against Trump should propel a dismissal of the New York hush money case, as well. But Merchan said he found that argument unpersuasive, noting that the hush money case was in a “vastly” different stage.
Trump’s sentencing initially was set for last July 11, then postponedtwice at the defense’s request.
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Associated Press writer Larry Neumeister contributed.
