American President-elect Donald Trump, convicted criminally in New York in the spring for hidden payments to a porn star, will receive his sentence on January 10, ten days before his inauguration, but he will not go to prison, announced Friday justice.
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The spokesperson for the future president immediately denounced an “attack” on presidential immunity.
Mr. Trump must “appear for sentencing following his conviction on January 10, 2025,” Manhattan Court Judge Juan Merchan ordered in an order dated Friday. He clarified that he was not “inclined to impose a sentence of incarceration” on the 45e and very soon 47e tenant of the White House, aged 78.
The convicted person will be able to appear in person in 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” known by Sunday, said the magistrate.
Juan Merchan, however, specified that a firm prison sentence – with a possible committal warrant – was made legally possible by the historic criminal conviction of May 30.
First ex-president convicted
That day, 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.
Justice had convicted him of “aggravated accounting falsification to conceal a plot to pervert the 2016 election” which he had won against Democrat Hillary Clinton.
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.
This immunity was extended on 1is July by a decision of the Supreme Court of the United States.
Political pressure
Under enormous political pressure, Judge Merchan had postponed the sentencing several times since May 30.
Judge Merchan’s decision to go through with the criminal proceedings “is a direct attack on the Supreme Court’s decision regarding presidential immunity,” thundered Donald Trump’s spokesperson, Steven Cheung, in allusion to this that the nine supreme judges, including six conservatives, decided in July.
Mr. Cheung further castigated “the witch hunts” and other “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.
The Manhattan prosecutor Alvin Bragg, who investigated the entire case, had thus proposed not to sentence the billionaire to a “penalty of incarceration” or that “the procedure be suspended during the term” of four years, i.e. until January 20, 2029.
Since his resounding re-election, the Republican has seen his criminal justice horizon almost completely clear.
Federal justice has abandoned two criminal proceedings for illegal attempts to reverse the results of the November 2020 presidential election, lost to Joe Biden, and for withholding classified documents after his chaotic departure from the White House on January 20, 2021.
In civil matters, on the other hand, despite again the argument of presidential immunity, Donald Trump remains liable for hundreds of millions of dollars in damages in at least three cases judged in New York.
The Stormy Daniels case is therefore the only criminal case to reach its conclusion, an unprecedented scenario in American history.
