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“President-elect Donald Trump will be sentenced on Jan. 10 in the criminal case in which he was convicted on charges involving hush money paid to a porn star, but is unlikely to face jail time or other penalties, a judge said [last] Friday…
“A Manhattan jury in May found Trump guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records to cover up the payment to [Stormy] Daniels. He had pleaded not guilty and called the case an attempt by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, the Democratic prosecutor who brought the charges, to harm his 2024 campaign…
“Trump's sentencing was initially scheduled for July 11, 2024, but has been pushed back several times. On Thursday, [Justice Juan] Merchan said Trump's request in August that the sentencing be pushed back until after the election implied that he consented to being sentenced during the transition period.” Reuters
Here are our previous editions on the verdict and on the delayed sentencing. The Flip Side
The left generally approves of the upcoming sentencing, arguing that Trump must be held accountable.
“‘The significance of the fact that the verdict was handed down by a unanimous jury of 12 of Defendant’s peers, after trial, cannot possibly be overstated,’ Merchan wrote. ‘Indeed, the sanctity of a jury verdict and the deference that must be accorded to it, is a bedrock principle in our Nation’s jurisprudence.’ No conspiracy, no rogue district attorney delivered the verdict. This was a jury of Trump’s peers whom he and his counsel approved in voir dire.”
Jennifer Rubin, Washington Post
“Out of an abundance of caution, Merchan avoided a preelection sentencing that potentially could have influenced the election. But the election result changes nothing about the criminal case. Now that the election is over, sentencing should proceed promptly. Once in office, Trump may cancel federal prosecutions of himself and his allies… But that doesn’t mean the DA or Merchan should ‘obey in advance’ by abandoning the jury’s verdict…
“Although the idea was unthinkable to many of us, a criminal can be president of the United States. The people have spoken, as Trump’s attorneys and supporters would say. But just as Trump’s criminal cases did not prevent his reelection, the election should not prevent the regular criminal process in New York from concluding.”
Randall D. Eliason, The Atlantic
“The first [of Trump’s arguments] is that as president-elect, he should have the benefit of the legal doctrine, anchored in a memorandum from the Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel, that sitting presidents can’t be prosecuted. That’s a lousy argument. The clear line in the memo is between the president and everyone else. Trump is part of everyone else, and not for arbitrary reasons. We have only one president at a time…
“The second argument, also a stretch, is that claims of immunity are entitled to immediate ‘interlocutory’ appeals. The problem here is Trump’s claim of immunity is poor, because the conduct for which he was convicted—paying hush money to keep the lid on an affair that could have derailed his 2016 candidacy, and falsifying business records to keep it concealed thereafter—was about as unofficial as it gets…
“Moreover, as the court has explained, the reason for the immediate appeal is to save the possibly immune official from possibly long and draining ‘extended proceedings’ that interfere with their official duties. A short sentencing before Trump is even president doesn’t fit that bill.”
Harry Litman, New Republic
Some argue, “Merchan had months and months to decide to sentence Trump. By waiting until the last minute, he’s putting all the courts in a bind… Merchan’s concern for the rule of law and his condemnation of Trump’s attack on the judiciary are well stated. But his timing puts higher courts in an impossible bind and his ruling is not likely to be well received by a Supreme Court especially protective of presidential power.”
Richard L. Hasen and Jeremy Stahl, Slate
The right is critical of the upcoming sentencing, arguing that Merchan has displayed clear anti-Trump bias.
The right is critical of the upcoming sentencing, arguing that Merchan has displayed clear anti-Trump bias.
“Merchan [claimed] that he had a responsibility to sentence Trump prior to inauguration, lest what the judge frames as an important public interest in getting the sentencing done were undermined. It is not clear to me that there is any such public interest. There seems, instead, to be the interest of Merchan – an activist Democrat who contributed to Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign against Trump in violation of state judicial ethics rules…
“This was, at most, a trivial, time-barred misdemeanor offense of record-keeping regarding a legal transaction (NDAs are legal and common) that Bragg – with enormous help from Merchan – gussied up into 34 felonies by purporting to enforce federal campaign finance laws that a state prosecutor has no authority to enforce (and that the relevant federal authorities concluded Trump didn’t violate)…
“The American people just elected Donald Trump president by not only an Electoral College majority but by a popular-vote edge. The public did so knowing full well about Bragg’s absurd criminal case in Manhattan. Clearly, there is no public clamor to see Trump sentenced prior to taking the nation’s highest office. There is, instead, a spiteful New York progressive Democratic interest in branding the Republican president-elect a convicted felon.”
Andrew C. McCarthy, Fox News
“[After the sentencing] Trump will finally be able to appeal this horrendous case… Appellate issues include charges based on a novel criminal theory through which [Bragg] not only zapped a dead misdemeanor into life (after the expiration of the statute of limitation) but based a state charge on federal election law and federal taxation violations. So, after the Justice Department declined to prosecute federal violations, Bragg effectively did so in state court with Merchan’s blessing…
“The issues also include Merchan’s absurd instructions to the jury. The novel theory demanded a secondary offense, the crime that Trump was seeking to conceal by listing payments as legal expenses. Merchan allowed the jury to find that the secondary offense was any of an array of vaguely defined options…
“Even CNN’s senior legal analyst Elie Honig denounced the case as legally flawed and unprecedented. Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) recently put it more simply and called the case total ‘bulls‑‑‑.’”
Jonathan Turley, The Hill
“Theoretically, bookkeeping errors were allegedly committed to further another crime in an unlawful attempt to influence the election. But what crime? No one can say. Was it federal campaign law violations? Taxation laws? False business records? Select from the aforementioned menu of imaginary possibilities. Trump doesn’t know because prosecutors never said. And neither did the jurors. In an appalling instruction to the panel, Merchan declared that they did not have to identify which crimes were supposedly perpetrated.”
Gregg Jarrett, Fox News
