Judge Juan Merchan, who presided over the criminal trial against Donald Trump for the Stormy Daniels case – the payment of a bribe to a porn actress to buy her silence, for which the Republican was found guilty on May 30 – has decided this Tuesday to postpone the sentence until September 18 after the Prosecutor’s Office agreed to the request of Trump’s legal team to take into account the ruling of the Supreme Court of the United States, the day before, on presidential immunity.
Hours after the Supreme Court’s decision granting broad immunity to presidents in official acts, Trump’s lead lawyer submitted a letter to Judge Merchan requesting permission to file a motion to challenge the verdict, just ten days before the sentencing date, scheduled for July 11, was announced. Manhattan prosecutors on Tuesday agreed to the defense’s request to postpone the criminal sentence so the judge could weigh whether the Supreme Court ruling called the conviction into question. By mid-afternoon local time, Merchan had decided to postpone the sentencing to September 18.
True to the dilatory strategy displayed during this and the rest of the trials facing their client — three other criminal cases in Washington, Georgia and Florida — Trump’s lawyers had asked the judge late on Monday to postpone the July 11 sentencing while he considered whether the Supreme Court ruling affected the conviction. However, a hypothetical annulment of the sentencing is a remote possibility, since the Manhattan case focuses on acts that Trump carried out as a candidate, not as president, and also the Supreme Court ruling establishes immunity in official, not private, actions.
On May 30, a Manhattan jury found Trump guilty of 34 counts of falsifying accounting records to cover up the payment of a bribe to the actress on the eve of the 2016 election, in which he won over Democrat Hillary Clinton. The ulterior purpose of this payment was to prevent the scandal of his extramarital relationship from harming his electoral chances, something that the prosecution described as a “criminal plot to tamper with the result” of those elections. Trump is the first former US president to be convicted of a criminal.
The efforts of his lawyers have been rewarded once again: hours after the office of prosecutor Alvin Bragg declined to make a sentencing recommendation to the judge on Monday, as expected, the official notification of the postponement of the sentence is almost a victory for the Republican. The sentence could consist of a maximum of four years in prison or, considering that he has no previous convictions, probation.
Trump’s attempt to challenge his conviction comes after the Supreme Court ruled Monday that presidents enjoy absolute immunity from prosecution for their major official acts. The high court’s decision could not have been more timely for his interests, as the man who is almost certain to be the Republican nominee for re-election at the Republican national convention in Milwaukee in two weeks seeks to avoid further trials before the November election in the three other politically motivated criminal cases he faces, two of them for trying to overturn the result of the 2020 election and the other for taking classified documents when he left the White House in January 2021.
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The Supreme Court decision, which was split along ideological lines — the six-member court’s conservative majority versus the three liberal justices — determined that Trump can claim criminal immunity for some of his actions as president before leaving office, which will likely further delay the three pending cases, especially the federal trial for electoral subversion arising from his actions on January 6, 2021, when an angry mob of his supporters stormed the Capitol after being harangued by the then-president. If the Republican is re-elected in November, he could pardon himself since this is a federal case.
Before the Supreme Court gave him a reprieve with its decision on presidential immunity, which makes it impossible for cases over the Republican’s role in the 2020 election to be heard before November, Trump’s legal team had also scored another small victory: Last week, Judge Merchan partially lifted the gag order to prevent the former president from criticizing witnesses, jurors and court officials during the trial. Now Trump will be able to speak out about them.
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