Trump to be sentenced in hush money case after Supreme Court rejects last-ditch appeal
President-elect Donald Trump is set to be sentenced on Friday for his New York hush money conviction after the nation's top court declined to interfere.
President-elect 'Donald Trump.'
Like so much else in the criminal case and the present American political scene, the situation poised to unfold in an austere Manhattan courtroom seemed unthinkable only a few years ago. A state court will decide what, if any, punishment the country's former and soon-to-be leader will face for offenses committed, as determined by a jury.
Seth Wenig/AP
With Trump's inauguration just 10 days away, Judge Juan M. Merchan has signaled that he intends to impose a no-penalty punishment known as an unconditional discharge, and prosecutors are not challenging it. That means no jail time, probation, or fines, but nothing is definite until Friday's proceedings are completed.
Regardless of the outcome, Trump will be the first convicted felon to become president.
Trump, who is expected to participate by video from his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, will have the opportunity to speak. He has condemned the case, which is the only one of his four criminal indictments that has gone to trial and may be the only one that ever will.
The judge has stated that he intends to provide unconditional discharge—a rarity in criminal convictions—in order to avoid knotty constitutional concerns that would emerge if he imposed a sentence that coincided with Trump's administration.
The hush money complaint accused him of falsifying his company's records to conceal a $130,000 payment to porn star Stormy Daniels. She was paid late in Trump's 2016 campaign not to go publicly about a sexual encounter she claims the two had a decade ago. He claims nothing sexual occurred between them, and that his political opponents staged a false prosecution to harm him.
"I have never fabricated business records. It is a contrived charge," the Republican president-elect said on his Truth Social platform last week. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, whose office filed the charges, is a Democrat.
Bragg's office stated in a court statement on Monday that Trump committed "serious offenses that caused extensive harm to the sanctity of the electoral process and the integrity of New York's financial marketplace."
While the precise charges included checks and ledgers, the underlying allegations were shady and intricately intertwined with Trump's political ascension. Prosecutors claimed Daniels was paid off — via Trump's personal attorney at the time, Michael Cohen — as part of a larger conspiracy to block voters from learning about Trump's alleged extramarital affairs.
Trump disputes that the purported encounters occurred. His attorneys said he sought to silence the reports to protect his family, not his campaign. And, although prosecutors claimed Cohen's reimbursements for paying Daniels were falsely recorded as legal expenditures, Trump says they were simply that.
"There was nothing else it could have been called," he said on Truth Social last week, adding, "I was hiding nothing."
Trump's attorneys sought unsuccessfully to avoid a trial. Since his May conviction on 34 charges of manipulating corporate documents, they have used nearly every legal tool available to try to get the verdict reversed, the case dropped, or the punishment postponed.
They have presented numerous arguments before Merchan, New York appellate judges, and federal courts, including the Supreme Court. The Trump attorneys have relied primarily on claims of presidential immunity from prosecution, and they received a lift in July from a Supreme Court ruling that grants past commanders-in-chief significant immunity.
When Daniels received payment in 2016, Trump was a private individual and presidential contender. He was president when Cohen's reimbursements were issued and documented the following year.
On the one hand, Trump's defense said that immunity should have prevented jurors from hearing some information, including as testimony regarding his talks with then-White House communications director Hope Hicks.
And after Trump won the election in November, his lawyers claimed that the case should be dropped to avoid interfering with his incoming president and transfer to the Oval Office.
Merchan, a Democrat, repeatedly postponed the sentencing, which was previously scheduled for July. However, last week, he selected Friday as the date, citing the necessity for "finality." He said that he tried to strike a balance between Trump's duty to govern, the Supreme Court's immunity decision, the respect given to a jury judgment, and the public's expectation that "no one is above the law."
Trump's attorneys then began a flurry of last-minute attempts to prevent the punishment. Their final hope evaporated Thursday night when the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 against delaying the punishment.
Meanwhile, the other criminal matters that previously loomed over Trump have been resolved or blocked before trial.
Following Trump's election, special counsel Jack Smith concluded federal investigations into Trump's handling of sensitive materials and efforts to reverse his 2020 election defeat. A state-level Georgia election meddling case is in limbo after prosecutor Fani Willis was pulled from it.
