By Luc Cohen
NEW YORK (Reuters) – U.S. President-elect Donald Trump is scheduled to be sentenced on Friday for a felony charge stemming from a secret payment to a porn star, a case that for a time overshadowed his bid to retake the White House.
The U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way Thursday for a ruling at 9:30 a.m. ET (1430 GMT) in New York state court in Manhattan, rejecting Trump’s last-minute request to stay 10 days before his Jan. 20 inauguration.
Judge Juan Merchan, who oversaw the six-week trial last year, has made it clear that he has no plans to send Trump to prison or fine him. But by granting an unconditional discharge, it would put the guilty verdict on Trump’s permanent record.
Trump, 78, who has pleaded not guilty, was expected to appear virtually at the hearing.
He fought tooth and nail to avoid the spectacle of being forced to appear before a state-level judge days before returning to the public office he lost four years ago.
“He doesn’t want to be convicted because it’s an official judgment that he’s a convicted felon,” said Cheryl Bader, a law professor at Fordham University in New York.
The trial took place against the extraordinary backdrop of Trump’s successful campaign to retake the White House. The verdict marks the culmination of the first criminal case brought against a US president, past or present.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, a Democrat, indicted Trump, a Republican, in March 2023 on 34 counts of falsifying business records to cover up a $130,000 payment by his former lawyer Michael Cohen to adult film star Stormy Daniels for her silence before the election in 2016 about sexual contact she had with Trump, who denied it.
Trump defeated Democrat Hillary Clinton in that election.
A Manhattan jury found Trump guilty of all 34 counts on May 30. Prosecutors argued that despite the bland nature of the charges, the case was an attempt to corrupt the 2016 election.
Critics of the businessman-turned-politician have cited the charges and other legal tangles he has faced to support their claim that he is unfit for public office.
Trump flipped the script. He argued that the case — along with three other criminal indictments and a civil suit charging him with fraud, defamation and sexual assault — was an attempt by opponents to weaponize the justice system against him and harm his re-election campaign.
He frequently attacked prosecutors and witnesses, and Merchan eventually fined Trump $10,000 for violating the ban.
Back on January 3, Trump called the judge a “radical partisan” in a post on his Truth Social platform.
In a decision that day, Merchan said overturning the verdict would “undermine the rule of law in immeasurable ways” and wrote that Trump’s conduct during the trial showed disrespect for the judiciary.
“The defendant has gone to great lengths to publicize on social media and other forums his lack of respect for judges, juries, grand juries and the justice system as a whole,” Merchan said.
Late Thursday, hours before the sentence was to be handed down, Trump wrote on his social media platform that he would appeal the case and was confident he would win.
POLITICAL MIXED BAG
The hush money case was widely seen as less serious than the three other criminal cases Trump has faced, in which he was accused of trying to overturn his 2020 election loss and withholding classified documents after leaving the White House. Trump has pleaded not guilty in all cases.
But Bragg’s case was the only criminal case to go to trial in the face of a flurry of challenges from Trump’s lawyers. After Trump’s election victory on Nov. 5, federal prosecutors dropped their two cases because of the Justice Department’s policy against prosecuting the sitting president.
The remaining state case, filed in Georgia over an attempt to overturn that state’s 2020 election results, is in limbo after a court in December disqualified the lead prosecutor in the case.
The hush money case was a mixed bag politically. Contributions to Trump’s campaign increased after he was indicted in March 2023, likely helping him defeat his rivals for the Republican nomination. During the trial, polls showed that most voters took the charges seriously, and his reputation among Republicans plummeted after the conviction.
But the case quickly faded from the headlines, especially after President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate dropped Vice President Kamala Harris to replace him on the Democratic ticket, and after a gunman’s bullet came inches from killing Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. .
Merchan had originally scheduled his sentencing for July 11, but has repeatedly postponed it at Trump’s request. In agreeing in September to delay sentencing until after the election, the judge wrote that he was careful not to be seen as putting his finger on the scales.
Forgery of business books is punishable by up to four years in prison. While it’s unlikely Trump would receive prison time because of his advanced age and lack of a criminal record, legal experts said it’s not impossible, especially given that he was violating the restraining order.
Trump’s victory and the upcoming inauguration made a prison sentence or probation even less practical.
