By South China Morning Post | Created at 2025-01-03 22:01:28 | Updated at 2025-01-05 21:03:29
1 day ago
In an extraordinary turn, a judge on Friday set US president-elect Donald Trump’s sentencing in his hush money case for January 10 – little over a week before he is set to return to the White House – but indicated he would not be jailed.
The development nevertheless leaves Trump on course to be the first president to take office convicted of felony crimes.
Judge Juan M. Merchan, who presided over Trump’s trial, signalled in a written decision that he would sentence the former and future president to what is known as a conditional discharge, in which a case gets dismissed if a defendant avoids rearrest.
Merchan rejected Trump’s push to dismiss the verdict and throw out the case on presidential immunity grounds and because of his impending return to the White House. The judge said he found “no legal impediment to sentencing” Trump and that it was “incumbent” on him to sentence Trump before his swearing-in on January 20.
“Only by bringing finality to this matter” will the interests of justice be served, Merchan wrote.
Trump was convicted in May of 34 counts of falsifying business records. They involved an alleged scheme to hide a hush money payment to porn actor Stormy Daniels in the last weeks of Trump’s first campaign in 2016. The payout was made to keep her from publicising claims she had had sex with the married Trump years earlier. He says that her story is false and that he did nothing wrong.
