Judge postpones Trump’s sentencing in Manhattan ‘hush money’ case

A Manhattan judge has postponed Donald Trump’s sentencing on his conviction in his hush-money case — and said he’ll weigh scrapping the case entirely in light of voters electing Trump as president.

Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan said he’ll consider claims 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 decision to pause Trump’s sentencing makes it overwhelmingly likely that the president-elect will re-enter the White House largely unscathed by the four criminal cases that had threatened to derail his campaign or even put him behind bars.

Manhattan Judge Juan Merchan has delayed sentencing on President-elect Donald Trump’s conviction related to hush money payoffs to porn star Stormy Daniels. AP

Judge Merchan ordered Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg 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 verdict should stand because the case was brought when Trump was a private citizen.

The sentencing delay follows a two-year legal saga that reached a crescendo with the theatric spectacle of Trump, 78, spending six weeks inside a dingy Manhattan courtroom listening to salacious testimony from witnesses like porn star Stormy Daniels, who testified to having sex with him in 2006.

Jurors saw evidence that Trump worked with his former fixer Michael Cohen and the National Enquirer magazine to buy up the rights to and bury damaging information about him, including Daniels’ tale about a brief tryst and Playboy Playmate Karen McDougal’s story about 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.

The guilty verdict verdict against Trump in May branded him a convicted felon in the final 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.

His campaign said it generated a “record-shattering” $34.8 million in small dollar donations in the hours after jurors found Trump guilty.

Trump had initially been set to be sentenced July 10, but the US Supreme Court threw a wrench into those plans by ruling that presidents cannot be prosecuted for “official acts” taken in office.

Bragg’s office argued that the ruling had “no bearing” on the hush\-money case, but Judge Merchan pushed the sentencing back to Sept.18 to give both sides time to hash the issue out.

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, rather than the law, so close to the election.

Trump’s three other criminal cases are either in limbo or winding down.

Federal cases in Washington, DC, and Florida — where Trump was charged with plotting to overthrow the 2020 election results and hoarding classified files at his Mar-A-Lago estate, respectively — are expected to be rolled back on Day 1 of his presidency, if not before.

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 a local prosecutor hiring a man she was romantically involved with to lead the case.