Trump sentenced without penalty, will be the first president to take office as a felon

US President-elect Donald Trump will not go to jail, pay a fine or be released on probation for his criminal conviction stemming from money paid to a porn star to keep her quiet, but the sentence imposed by a judge on Friday he pleads guilty to his record.

Judge Juan Merchán’s sentence to the unconditional freedom of Trump, 78, a few days before his inauguration on January 20, closes a case that loomed over his attempt to retake the White House.

By granting an unconditional release, Merchan places a guilty judgment on Trump’s permanent record without any other legal sanction. Trump will be the first president to take office with a criminal conviction.

Merchan said he was imposing the sentence because the US Constitution protects presidents from US prosecution. But he said the protections granted to the office “do not reduce the seriousness of a crime or justify its commission in any way.”

“Despite the extraordinary breadth of those protections, one power they do not provide is the power to expunge jury verdicts,” Merchan said.

Trump pleaded not guilty and promised to appeal the guilty verdict. He appeared with his attorney on television screens beamed into the courtroom with two American flags in the background.

“It’s been a political witch hunt,” Trump said before handing down the sentence, wearing a red tie with white stripes. “It was done to damage my reputation so that I would lose the election and obviously that didn’t work.”

“I’m totally innocent, I didn’t do anything wrong,” said Trump, who did not testify during the six-week trial last year.

Now that he has been sentenced, he is free to appeal, a process that could take years and play out while he serves a four-year term as president.

Trump fought tooth and nail to avoid the spectacle of being forced to appear before a state judge so close to the date he is due to take office. The US Supreme Court on Thursday rejected a last-minute attempt by Trump to stop him.

Last year’s six-week trial unfolded against the extraordinary backdrop of Trump’s successful campaign to retake the White House. The ruling marks the culmination of the first criminal case brought against a United States president, past or present.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, a Democrat, charged Trump, a Republican, in March 2023 with 34 counts of falsifying business records to cover up the $130,000 payment from his former lawyer Michael Cohen to the film actress. for adults Stormy Daniels for her silence before the 2016 election about a sexual encounter she said she had with Trump, who denied it.

Trump defeated Democrat Hillary Clinton in that election.

The Manhattan jury found Trump guilty on all 34 counts on May 30. Prosecutors argued that despite the vulgar nature of the allegations, the case was an attempt to corrupt the 2016 election.

Critics of the businessman-turned-politician cited the charges and other legal entanglements he faced to bolster their claim that he was unfit for public office.

Trump changed the script. He argued that the case – along with three other criminal indictments and civil lawsuits accusing him of fraud, defamation and sexual abuse – was an effort by opponents to use the justice system as a weapon against him and harm his re-election campaign.

He frequently lashed out at prosecutors and witnesses, and Merchan eventually fined Trump $10,000 for violating a gag order.

As recently as Jan. 3, Trump called the judge a “radical partisan” in a post on his Truth Social platform.

In a decision that day, Merchan said overturning the verdict would “immeasurably undermine the rule of law” and wrote that Trump’s behavior during the trial showed a lack of respect for the judiciary.

“The defendant has gone to great lengths to spread on social media and other forums his lack of respect for judges, juries, grand juries and the justice system as a whole,” Merchan said.

A MIXED POLITICAL BAG

The hush money case was widely considered less serious than the three other criminal cases Trump faced, in which he was accused of trying to overturn his 2020 election loss and withholding classified documents after leaving the White House. Trump pleaded not guilty in all cases.

But Bragg’s case was the only one that went to trial amid an avalanche of challenges from Trump’s lawyers. After Trump’s Nov. 5 election victory, federal prosecutors backed off on both of their cases because of the Justice Department’s policy of not prosecuting a sitting president.

The remaining state case, brought in Georgia over efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in that state, is in limbo after a court in December disqualified the case’s lead prosecutor.

The secret money case was politically mixed. Contributions to Trump’s campaign increased after he was impeached in March 2023, likely helping him beat his rivals for the Republican nomination. During the trial, polls showed that most voters took the charges seriously, and his standing among Republicans declined after the guilty verdict.

But the case quickly faded from the headlines, particularly after President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance led him to withdraw and Vice President Kamala Harris replaced him on the Democratic ticket, and after a gunman’s bullet was shot. inches from killing Trump at a rally in Butler. Pennsylvania.

Merchan initially scheduled sentencing for July 11, but delayed it several times at Trump’s request. In agreeing in September to defer sentencing until after the election, the judge wrote that he feared he would be perceived as putting his thumb on the scale.

Falsifying business records is punishable by up to four years in prison. While Trump was unlikely to be imprisoned due to his advanced age and lack of criminal record, legal experts said it was not impossible, especially given his violations of the gag order.

Trump’s victory and his impending inauguration made a jail sentence or probation even less practical.