President-elect Donald Trump’s bid to toss his “hush money” case was denied Friday by a Manhattan judge — who scheduled sentencing for 10 days before the inauguration.
Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan wrote in the highly-anticipated decision that he was inclined to sentence Trump to “unconditional discharge” — meaning no imprisonment, fines or probation supervision.
“A sentence of an unconditional discharge appears to be the most viable solution to ensure finality and allow Defendant to pursue his appellate options,” the 18-page ruling reads.
The judge said Trump could appear either in person or virtually for the sentencing, which he set for Jan. 10 — noting it was in the public’s best interest to bring closure to the case before Inauguration Day.
Merchan kept intact the jury verdict finding Trump guilty on 34 felonies for concealing a payoff that hid a sex scandal before the 2016 presidential election — rejecting his claim that the case should vanish because voters elected him to a second term.
Trump’s lawyers had claimed that Merchan failing to throw out the jury’s verdict would unconstitutionally interfere with the president-elect preparing to serve a second term.
They also argued that the conviction should be overturned based on July’s US Supreme Court ruling immunizing a president for “official acts” taken in office.
The trial was irreparably “tainted” by evidence jurors heard from Trump’s first White House term, the attorneys claimed.
Prosecutors fired back that the high court ruling should not apply because covering up a porn star payoff from the Oval Office did not qualify as one of a president’s “official acts.”
Merchan said in his ruling that immunity from criminal process for a sitting president does not extent to a president-elect.
Any claim that “circumstance have changed” as a result of his election win “while convenient, is disingenuous,” he wrote.
“Finding no legal impediment to sentencing and recognizing that Presidential immunity will likely attach once Defendant takes his Oath of Office, it is incumbent upon this Court to set this matter down for the imposition of sentence prior to January 20, 2025,” Merchan wrote.
“It is this Court’s firm belief that only by bringing finality to this matter will all three interests be served.”
Merchan’s decision follows a legal saga that reached its boiling point with Trump, 78, being diverted from his presidential campaign to sit at a courtroom defense table listening to salacious testimony from ex-porn star Stormy Daniels — who testified to having a brief sex romp with him — and his former fixer Michael Cohen.
The case brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg used an unusual legal theory and was legally dense — giving critics room to attack it as what they called a selective prosecution of the then-frontrunner for the GOP presidential nomination.
The prosecution centered on allegations that Trump covered up a $130,000 payout from Cohen to Daniels meant to silence her story about having sex in 2006 with the married real-estate mogul.
Jurors saw 11 invoices, 12 digital ledger entries and 11 checks to Cohen — most of which were signed by Trump — that showed the Trump Organization disguising Cohen’s repayments as phony legal services.
Bragg’s theory of the case was that Trump’s crimes were multi-layered.
First, falsifying business records is a misdemeanor — but doing it to cover up another crime is a felony.
That crime, prosecutors said, was that the payoff was part of an illegal scheme to hide sex scandals from voters before the 2016 presidential election, where Trump ended up defeating Democrat Hillary Clinton.
Jurors saw evidence that Trump worked with Cohen and the National Enquirer magazine to buy up the rights to and bury damaging information about him, like Daniels’ tale about a brief tryst, and Playboy Playmate Karen McDougal’s tale of a months-long affair with Trump.
“What do we got to pay for this? One-fifty?” Trump told Cohen in a secretly made recording, appearing to reference a $150,000 payoff to McDougal.
Bragg’s office claimed that the “catch and kill” payouts breached an obscure New York election law barring “conspiring to promote or prevent someone’s election through ‘unlawful means.’”
Judge Merchan gave jurors three options for what “unlawful means” then underpinned the election fraud, including that the Daniels payment exceeded a $2,700 federal cap on campaign contribution limits.
But the court did not require jurors to select a specific unlawful means on the verdict sheet — a confusing move that gave the case’s critics fuel to claim, falsely, that jurors did not “unanimously” convict Trump.
Throughout it all, Trump repeated his mantra that the trial was a “witch hunt” orchestrated by Democrats, and proclaimed without providing hard evidence that the trial was “rigged” against him.
Bragg is an elected Democrat, and Judge Merchan, who has insisted that politics have nothing to do with his rulings, donated $35 to Democrat causes in 2020, including $15 to President Joe Biden, records show.
Trump spent the six-week trial trashing the proceedings in daily addresses in the courthouse hallway, and repeatedly violating the judge’s limited gag order by slamming witnesses and the jury.
“The real verdict is going to be Nov. 5 by the people,” he proclaimed in May, moments after Manhattan jurors convicted him on the 34 falsifying business records counts.
Americans consistently told pollsters that the case’s outcome would not affect their vote.
In fact, Bragg’s case arguably helped propel Trump to victory. His campaign said that it generated a “record-shattering” $34.8 million in small dollar donations in the hours after the guilty verdict.
Months later, Trump won a second presidential term in an an Electoral College landslide over Vice President Kamala Harris.