The News
Donald Trump’s sentencing in the New York hush-money case will be delayed until after the presidential election, postponing a decision that could have had a significant impact on the race.
Judge Juan Merchan wrote Friday that he had decided to delay the case to “to avoid any appearance — however unwarranted — that the proceeding has been affected by or seeks to affect the approaching Presidential election.”
Instead of Sept. 18, Trump is now scheduled to be sentenced on Nov. 26. The Republican nominee faces up to four years in jail after he was found guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records to cover up an affair with adult film star Stormy Daniels as part of a conspiracy to mislead voters ahead of the 2016 US presidential election.
SIGNALS
The judge faced an ‘impossible’ situation with no easy answer
Merchan’s decision would have sparked debate irrespective of what he chose to do. If he had ruled that the sentencing would take place this month, he would have likely faced attacks from Trump, whose lawyers argued that there would be no other reason for sentencing the former president so close to the Nov. 5 election than “election-interference objectives.” Now that he has ruled to delay the sentencing, Merchan will likely be criticized for giving Trump special treatment. “The judge is in an almost impossible situation,” Charles Geyh, a law professor, told the Times before his ruling.
Guilty verdict under question from Supreme Court’s presidential immunity decision
Merchan is also expected to rule on Sept. 16 whether to throw the case out altogether following the Supreme Court’s ruling in July that former presidents have immunity from prosecution for their official conduct. While Trump’s lawyers have not argued that his hush money payments were official acts, they have argued that prosecutors used evidence that should have been protected by the ruling. But the judge will likely reject that argument given that the payments and most of the actions taken by Trump in the case happened before he was president, Anna Cominsky of the New York Law School told The Hill. Ultimately, it could end up at the Supreme Court, in which case all bets would be off, Roger Parloff, a senior editor at Lawfare, wrote.
Trump continues delay, delay, delay strategy
On Thursday, a judge in Trump’s federal election interference case accused his lawyers of trying to delay potentially damaging evidence from being made public before the election. Trump’s lawyer argued new evidence should not be presented at such a “sensitive time,” leading to a rebuke from the judge who said she is “not concerned with the electoral schedule.” But Trump’s strategy of delaying cases at every turn means that none of them will be be fully resolved by the election. If he is reelected in November, a longstanding Justice Department policy that officials cannot charge a sitting president, coupled with the possibility that Trump would appoint officials willing to drop the cases could mean that federal prosecutions against Trump would likely be put on hold after inauguration day.