Left: Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg speaks during a news conference on Feb. 22, 2024, in New York (AP Photo/Frank Franklin II). Right: Former President Donald Trump speaks after meeting with members of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters at their headquarters on Jan. 31, 2024, in Washington (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik).
A state judge in New York has put the brakes on Donald Trump’s sentencing in the criminal hush-money case, adjourning the Nov. 26, proceeding without explanation.
New York County Judge Juan Merchan on Tuesday abruptly canceled the sentencing hearing as he awaits a filing from Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg regarding how the prosecutor’s office plans to move forward now that the defendant in the case has become the president-elect.
Merchan last week had been set to decide whether Trump’s 34 felony criminal convictions will stand in light of the U.S. Supreme Court’s sweeping presidential immunity decision and Trump’s victory in the presidential election. Instead, Merchan granted a joint request from prosecutors and the defense to pause deadlines in the case and requested that prosecutors on Nov. 19, 2024, file with the court their “view of appropriate steps going forward.”
Trump’s legal team have repeatedly requested that his convictions be set aside and have sought to have the indictment against him dismissed, an argument that has only been made stronger since his election victory.
“The stay, and dismissal, are necessary to avoid unconstitutional impediments to President Trump’s ability to govern,” Trump’s attorney wrote in court documents filed last week.
Following the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling in July, Trump’s attorneys have argued that portions of the evidence presented during the former and soon-to-be president’s criminal trial earlier this year was improperly shown to the jury. The justices ruled that a sitting president is immune from prosecution for any official acts taken while in office and evidence of a president’s official acts cannot be used against a president in a criminal case, even where the underlying conduct is personal in nature.
In previous court filings, Trump attorneys Emil Bove and Todd Blanche have argued that trial testimony relating to Trump’s communications with then-White House staffers — former Communications Director Hope Hicks and former Director of White House Operations Madeleine Westerhout — should have been shielded from jurors.
Trump was convicted in May on 34 counts of falsifying business records in the Empire State. The charges stemmed from a $130,000 hush-money payment made by Trump’s former personal attorney and fixer, Michael Cohen, to adult content creator Stormy Daniels in October 2016.
Merchan had originally set sentencing for July, but pushed the hearing to Nov. 26, to avoid any appearance of election interference.
The payment to Daniels came ahead of Trump’s 2016 presidential election victory, but his attorneys have argued that subsequent actions taken after he was in the White House should have been excluded from trial.
Trump also claimed a more fundamental problem — that evidence of his official acts as president infected the indictment itself, because such evidence was presented during the grand jury process. Specifically, Trump argued that the state improperly used a few references to David Pecker, 72, the onetime CEO of the National Enquirer’s parent company American Media Inc., in laying out its case for grand jurors.
Pushing back against the president-elect’s assertions, prosecutors previously filed court documents arguing that the evidence in question was but a few trees in a forest of evidence.
“For all the pages that defendant devotes to his current motion, the evidence that he claims is affected by the Supreme Court’s ruling constitutes only a sliver of the mountains of testimony and documentary proof that the jury considered in finding him guilty of all 34 felony charges beyond a reasonable doubt,” a previous motion from Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office stated. “Under these circumstances, there is no basis for disturbing the jury’s verdict, and defendant’s motion should be denied.”
While it is unclear whether Merchan will overturn Trump’s felony convictions, it is exceedingly unlikely that the judge will sentence the president-elect to any time behind bars just weeks before he’s inaugurated for the second time.
“The odds of him going to jail are zero at this point,” Mark Bederow, a New York City criminal defense lawyer and former Manhattan prosecutor, said in an interview with USA Today. “He’s not going to sweep subways and push papers and do community service either — it’s just become untenable.”
Bederow also emphasized that sentencing Trump to prison could cause additional political upheaval in an already precariously polarized nation.
“I think that any judge can’t ignore the 800-pound gorilla in the room, which is this guy was just resoundingly voted to be the next president,” Bederow told the newspaper. “If [Merchan] were to sentence [Trump], this country is going to get torn apart even further at the seams.”
At the federal level, special counsel Jack Smith has already begun winding down prosecutions relating to Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents and efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election due to the Justice Department’s long-standing rule against prosecuting sitting presidents.
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