Already convicted in this case of hidden payments, Donald Trump is already certain of not receiving a prison sentence.
American President-elect Donald Trump, convicted in the spring by a New York criminal court of concealed payments to a porn star, will receive his sentence on January 10, which will not be prison terms, announced the judge who presided this historic trial. Donald Trump must “appear for his sentence, following his conviction, on January 10, 2025”ordered Judge Juan Merchan in an order on Friday, while specifying that he was not “inclined to impose a sentence of incarceration” to the man who on January 20 will become the 47e president of the United States. The convicted person will be able to appear in person at the court, at the courthouse in the south of the big New York island of Manhattan, or remotely by video, but he will have to make his “preference” by Sunday, the magistrate said.
On May 30, after six weeks of trial in the middle of the electoral campaign, in an electric climate, Donald Trump was the first former American president to be criminally convicted. The jury of the Manhattan court, dependent on the local justice of the State of New York, had found him guilty of 34 counts of hidden payments to a porn star, Stormy Daniels, made just before the presidential election of November 2016. The courts convicted him of “aggravated accounting falsification to conceal a plot to pervert the 2016 election” which he won against Democrat Hillary Clinton.
Accusations of “witch hunts”
According to the courts, these $130,000 paid to Stormy Daniels, real name Stephanie Clifford, were to encourage her to keep quiet about a brief sexual encounter in 2006 when Donald Trump was already married to Melania, then pregnant with their son. The person concerned denies any sexual relationship. After months of appeals and the victory in the presidential election on November 5, the Trump camp failed to overturn this historic verdict on the basis of presidential immunity.
Steven Cheung, a spokesperson for Donald Trump, denounced this Friday a “direct attack on the Supreme Court’s decision regarding immunity” presidential, in a press release. The latter referring to the decision of the American high court which recognized in July a very broad presumption of immunity for the President of the United States. Steven Cheung lambasted again “witch hunts” and others “hoaxes” orchestrated according to him by the outgoing administration of Democratic President Joe Biden.
The lawyers of the next president, who should be his future numbers two, three and four at the Department of Justice, presented this fall yet another appeal against the Manhattan verdict, invoking the presidential status of their client. Judge Merchan then asked the prosecution and the defense to find «arrangements» and not “weigh” on the second Trump presidency. Manhattan prosecutor Alvin Bragg, who investigated the entire case, proposed not to sentence the billionaire to a “penalty of incarceration” or that “the procedure is suspended during the mandate” of four years, i.e. until January 20, 2029.
