In a unique moment in American history, President-elect Donald Trump faces sentencing Friday for his bribery conviction in New York after the highest court in the country refused to intervene.
Like many other things in the criminal case and in the current American political landscape, the scenario that will play out in an austere Manhattan courtroom was unimaginable just a few years ago. A state judge must decide what consequences, if any, the country’s former and future leader will face for the serious crimes a jury found he committed.
Ten days before Trump’s inauguration, Judge Juan M. Merchan has indicated that he plans a sentence without penalty called unconditional acquittal and prosecutors are not opposed to it. That would mean no prison sentences, no probation or fines would be imposed, but nothing is final until Friday’s procedure is carried out.
Regardless of the outcome, Trump will become the first person convicted of a felony to assume the presidency. Trump, who is expected to appear by video from his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida, will have a chance to speak. He has ridiculed the case, the only one of his four criminal indictments that has gone to trial and possibly the only one that ever will.
The judge has indicated he plans unconditional release, a rarity in felony convictions, in part to avoid complicated constitutional issues that would arise if he imposed a sentence that overlapped with Trump’s presidency.
The hush money case accused him of falsifying his business records to conceal a $130,000 payment to porn actress Stormy Daniels. She was paid, at the end of Trump’s 2016 campaign, not to tell the public about a sexual encounter she claims the two had a decade earlier. He says nothing sexual happened between them, and maintains that his political opponents made up a false accusation to try to harm him.
“I have never falsified business records. “This is a false and fabricated allegation,” the Republican president-elect wrote on his Truth Social platform last week. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, whose office brought the charges, is a Democrat.
Bragg’s office said in a court filing Monday that Trump committed “serious crimes that caused extensive harm to the sanctity of the electoral process and the integrity of the New York financial market.”
While the specific charges concerned checks and ledgers, the underlying allegations were sordid and deeply entangled with Trump’s political rise. Prosecutors said Daniels received payments (through Trump’s personal lawyer at the time, Michael Cohen) as part of a broader effort to prevent voters from learning about Trump’s alleged extramarital escapades.
Trump denies that the alleged meetings occurred. His lawyers said he wanted to silence the stories to protect his family, not his campaign. And while prosecutors said Cohen’s reimbursements for paying Daniels were misleadingly recorded as legal expenses, Trump says that’s simply what they were.
“There was no other way to call it,” he wrote on Truth Social last week, adding, “I wasn’t hiding anything.”
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