President-elect Donald Trump will be sentenced on January 10 in the New York case.
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Rebecca Noble/Getty Images
President-elect Donald Trump is scheduled to be sentenced on January 10 in New York, ten days before he is sworn in as president of the United States.
In a ruling issued Friday, New York Judge Juan Merchan noted that his intention was not to impose a prison sentence. In the filing, Merchan noted that if a sentence cannot be issued before Trump takes the oath of office, the only other viable option might be to delay the proceedings until the end of Trump’s presidential term.
In May, Trump was convicted of 34 counts of falsifying business records, officially qualifying him as a convicted felon. The decision also comes after Merchan ruled last month that Trump was not immune from conviction in the case.
The proceedings had been suspended indefinitely so that Trump’s legal team could argue for the case to be thrown out.
In a statement, the Trump-Vance transition team called the order a “witch hunt.”
“There should be no convictions and President Trump will continue to fight these hoaxes until they are all dead,” said Steven Cheung, a Trump spokesman.
Trump’s New York criminal charges were the only ones to go to trial
After about a day and a half of deliberations, 12 New York jurors said last May that they were unanimous that Trump had falsified business records to conceal a secret $130,000 payment to the adult film star Stormy Daniels in order to influence the 2016 elections.
After the verdict, Trump virtually completed a pre-sentencing interview with the New York City Probation Department. Prosecutors from the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, which prosecuted Trump, and Trump’s legal teams each submitted sentencing recommendations last month. These documents have not been made public.
Trump also focused on raising campaign donations and raising legal fees using the conviction as a fundraising tool. In the 24 hours after the guilty verdict, Trump’s campaign boasted of raising millions of dollars. Trump and his legal team have also pledged to appeal the conviction, a process that could take years.
The jury heard from 22 witnesses during about four weeks of testimony in Manhattan Criminal Court. Jurors also weighed other evidence — primarily documents such as phone records, bills and checks addressed to Michael Cohen, Trump’s once-loyal “fixer” who paid Daniels to keep his story of a alleged affair with former president.
The facts relating to the payments and invoices characterized as legal services were not in dispute. What prosecutors had to prove was that Trump had falsified the records in order to commit another crime — in this case, by violating New York’s election law that makes it a crime for “two or more people (to) conspire to promote or prevent the election. of any person to public office by illegal means. Jurors were able to choose whether these illegal means violated federal campaign law, falsified tax returns or falsified other business records.
The verdict came more than a year after a grand jury indicted Trump on March 30, 2023, marking the first time a former or sitting president faced criminal charges.
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