President-elect Donald Trump, convicted criminally in New York in the spring for hidden payments to a porn star, is seeking to postpone the pronouncement of his sentence scheduled for Friday, ten days before his inauguration, according to an appeal made public Monday.
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Yet another legal maneuver, the lawyers of the man who will be the 47th President of the United States on January 20 are demanding an “automatic suspension” of the procedure.
This provides, under a January 3 order from a judge at Manhattan Criminal Court, that the sentence be announced at a hearing on January 10 at 9:30 a.m.
It is on this date, postponed many times, that Mr. Trump should in principle know his “sentence” even if the Republican, elected on November 5, will not a priori go to prison.
“The court must cancel the sentencing hearing scheduled for January 10, 2025, and suspend all deadlines in this case until appeals based on President Trump’s immunity have been completely and finally exhausted, and that the case is ultimately abandoned,” write lawyers Todd Blanche and Emil Bove in an appeal dated Sunday.
The latter were tipped by Donald Trump to become the next numbers two and three at the Department of Justice.
New York judge Juan Merchan, who presided over the “Stormy Daniels” trial in the spring and pronounced the criminal conviction on May 30, had until Monday 2 p.m. to give his response, according to Mes Blanche and Bove.
Failing which, they will “examine any emergency appeal”.
The head of the Manhattan Prosecutor’s Office, prosecutor Alvin Bragg, who investigated the entire case, responded in an order that “the court should reject the guilty party’s request and proceed with pronouncing the sentence as scheduled on January 10.”
After six weeks of trial in the middle of the electoral campaign, in an electric climate, Donald Trump on May 30 became the first former American president (2017-2021) to be criminally convicted.
The popular jury of the Manhattan court found him guilty of 34 counts for hidden payments of $130,000 to a porn star, Stormy Daniels, made just before the November 2016 presidential election.
It was not the checks that he was accused of, but “aggravated accounting falsification to conceal a plot to pervert the 2016 election”, won against Democrat Hillary Clinton.
Mr. Trump and his entourage have repeatedly denounced a “masquerade”, a “witch hunt” orchestrated according to them by the New York justice system and the Democratic administration of President Joe Biden.
Donald Trump failed to overturn this historic verdict on the basis of presidential immunity, a constitutional principle that the Supreme Court of the United States had largely expanded on July 1, to the advantage of the former and future president.
