You might recall the attempts to de-rail Trump’s bid for the presidency with a legal saga that reached boiling point during his presidential campaign, when he was forced to sit in a courtroom listening to salacious testimony from porn star Stormy Daniels.
The Manhattan Supreme Court judge, Juan Manuel Merchan, a registered Democrat donor, kept intact the verdict finding Trump guilty of thirty-four felonies for concealing a payoff to Daniels to hide a sex scandal before the 2016 presidential election. He will sentence Trump today, just ten days before the inauguration.
Merchan has suggested that he was inclined to sentence Trump to “unconditional discharge” — meaning no imprisonment, fines or probation supervision. But that means Trump will be the first president convicted of felony crimes when he takes office. I suspect we might hear that frequently.
The Democrat supporting judge threw out Trump’s defence that the conviction should be overturned because of July’s US Supreme Court ruling immunising a president for “official acts” taken in office, saying that immunity from criminal process does not extend to a president-elect.
Trump can appear either in person or virtually for the sentencing today as, according to the judge, it is ‘in the public’s best interest to bring closure to the case before Inauguration Day.’ Merchan noted that, while Trump could have faced up to four years behind bars on each of the counts brought against him, “a sentence of an unconditional discharge appears to be the most viable solution to ensure finality.”
Legal arguments have been flung around with abandon by both sides after Trump’s election win. Trump’s lawyers had claimed that Merchan failing to throw out the jury’s verdict would unconstitutionally interfere with the president-elect preparing to serve a second term, and also argued the trial was irreparably “tainted” by evidence jurors heard from Trump’s first White House term, acts that should fall under presidential immunity.
The fanatically anti-Trump Democrat Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who brought the case, suggested pausing the case until after Trump’s second term.
Judge Merchan insisted that politics played no role in his decisions. Trump disagrees, saying “I did absolutely nothing wrong. This is a political witch hunt by Biden and the DOJ.”
The case brought by Bragg, an elected Democrat, used an unusual and dense legal theory — giving critics room to attack the case as a selective prosecution of the then-frontrunner for president. Bragg argued that falsifying business records is a misdemeanour, but doing it to cover up another crime is a felony. That crime, he said, was that the payoff was part of an illegal scheme to hide sex scandals from voters before the 2016 presidential election, claiming that the “catch and kill” payouts breached an obscure New York election law barring “conspiring to promote or prevent someone’s election through ‘unlawful means.”
This does not, apparently, include hiding critical information found on laptop computers.
Unusually, the court did not require jurors to select a specific unlawful means on the verdict sheet — a confusing move that gave the case’s critics fuel to claim that jurors did not “unanimously” convict Trump.
As it happened, Bragg’s case helped propel Trump to victory, as it generated a “record-shattering” $34.8 million in small dollar donations in the hours after the guilty verdict. Thank you, Alvin Bragg.
In other news from the United States, Biden awarded George Soros and Hillary Clinton the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Biden also pardoned his laptop losing son for all and any crimes he might have committed. Who said Biden has no sense of humour.