OAN Staff James Meyers
9:00 AM – Friday, November 22, 2024
A Manhattan judge has postponed Donald Trump’s sentencing for his conviction in his hush-money case and said he’ll consider getting rid of the case entirely after voters elected him to become the next President.
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Juan Merchan said he will take claims into consideration from Trump’s lawyers that pressing on with such a case involving a president-elect would interfere with the “orderly transition of executive power” and be “uniquely destabilizing” to the country.
The latest decision to halt Trump’s sentencing will most likely result in the president-elect entering the White House without any consequences from the four criminal cases that threatened to put him behind bars.
Meanwhile, Merchan ordered Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg (D-N.Y.) and Trump’s lawyers to file their arguments in December on whether the case should be tossed before the court issues its decision.
Bragg has argued that the case should not be halted because it was ongoing when Trump was a private citizen.
The pause in sentencing comes after a two-year legal battle, with Trump spending six weeks in and out of a Manhattan courtroom listening to testimonies from witnesses such as porn star Stormy Daniels, who testified having sex with him in 2006.
The guilty verdict against Trump in May gave him the title of a convicted felon in the last few months of his presidential campaign, but the president-elect used it as a rallying cry for his supporters, insisting that the case was a “witch hunt” orchestrated against him by Democrats.
Hours after the guilty verdict, Trump’s campaign claimed that it generated a “record-shattering” $34.8 million in small-dollar donations.
Trump had initially been set to be sentenced on July 10th, but the US Supreme Court altered those plans by ruling that presidents cannot be prosecuted for “official acts” taken in office.
Merchan later moved the sentencing to November, citing what he called “unwarranted “ claims that his decision on Trump’s punishment could be based on politics, instead of the law, as the election loomed.
Trump’s three other criminal cases are continuing to wind down.
A state case in Georgia over Trump’s alleged bid to overturn the election results, meanwhile, is nowhere near a trial date after being derailed by a controversy over Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis (D-Ga.) hiring a man Nathan Wade, who she was romantically involved with to lead the case.
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