President-elect Donald J. Trump has signaled he plans to mount a full-scale legal offensive to avoid his criminal sentencing in New York, seeking a last-minute pardon before becoming the first president convicted of a felony.
With sentencing scheduled for Friday, just 10 days before the presidential inauguration, Trump’s lawyers implored the judge overseeing his case to postpone the proceedings, according to a court filing revealed Monday.
Although that request is most likely doomed to failure (Judge Juan M. Merchán was the one who scheduled the sentencing), Trump’s lawyers revealed in the filing that they planned to intensify their effort. If the judge does not suspend the sentence by 2 p.m. Monday, according to the document, Trump “will seek emergency appellate review.”
Hoping to persuade a New York appeals court to intervene, Trump’s lawyers plan to file a civil action against Judge Merchan and try to freeze the sentence, according to the document. It’s unclear when they will bring that action to the appeals court, but it could come as soon as Monday.
Although Judge Merchan has signaled that he will spare the former president and future president any substantial punishment, Trump is fighting to avoid the symbolic blow of the sentence. Once Trump is sentenced on the 34-count conviction, he will formally become a felon.
In the filing before Judge Merchan revealed Monday, Trump’s lawyers argued that the sentence would also become a distraction from his presidential duties.
“This court’s decision to schedule a sentencing hearing on January 10, 2025, at the cusp of the presidential transition and 10 days before President Trump takes office, requires that President Trump be forced to continue defending his criminal case while in office. ” wrote his attorneys, Todd Blanche and Emil Bove.
In the same filing, Trump’s lawyers indicated they also planned to challenge Judge Merchan’s decision last month to uphold the conviction. In preserving the May jury verdict, the judge rejected Trump’s argument that a recent Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity had overturned his conviction for falsifying business records to cover up a sex scandal.
Trump’s lawyers said they planned to appeal Judge Merchan’s rulings and file an action against him as a so-called Article 78 petition, a special procedure used to challenge decisions made by New York state agencies and judges. In essence, the president-elect would file a civil case against the judge to undo his recent decisions to uphold the conviction and schedule sentencing.
The appeals court could act quickly. An appeals judge could rule on the petitions as soon as Monday, deciding to grant or deny a provisional stay of the sentence. While normally that judge’s ruling would only be temporary — a full panel of appeals judges is supposed to evaluate Trump’s claims in the coming weeks — the case against the president-elect is running out of time.
Once Trump is sworn in on Jan. 20, the proceedings could halt, potentially making any additional rulings moot. Under longstanding Justice Department policy, sitting presidents cannot face federal prosecution, and although the New York case was brought in state, not federal, court, it will most likely follow that precedent.
In a filing Monday, the Manhattan district attorney’s office opposed canceling the sentencing date and disputed Trump’s arguments that the case would loom during his next term.
Prosecutors urged Judge Merchan to deny Trump’s request, citing “the strong public interest in prompt prosecution and finality of criminal proceedings, interests that are particularly salient here in light of the jury’s guilty verdict.”
It is unclear when Judge Merchan will rule, or whether Trump will move forward with his appeals court filings before the judge issues a decision.
In a statement, a spokesperson for Trump declared that his legal team was taking steps “to stop illegal sentencing in the Manhattan DA’s witch hunt.” Spokesman Steven Cheung added that: “The Supreme Court’s landmark decision on immunity, the New York State Constitution and other established legal precedents demand that this baseless hoax be immediately dismissed.”
Attacking the judges, particularly Judge Merchan, is a key page in Trump’s legal playbook. And so is the delay.
Trump, after being impeached four times in four different jurisdictions, used a combination of appeals and court filings to manufacture delay after delay in each of the cases. The effort, although dispersed, effectively ran out of time.
The federal special counsel who brought two of those cases (one in Washington, D.C., the other in Florida) recently closed them, bowing to a Justice Department policy that prohibits federal prosecutions of sitting presidents. And in Georgia, where Trump is accused of trying to subvert the results of the 2020 state election, an appeals court disqualified the local prosecutor who brought the casedelaying it indefinitely.
In New York, Judge Merchan had already postponed sentencing several times. He initially delayed it to consider Trump’s attempt to overturn the conviction based on the recent Supreme Court decision. grant presidents broad immunity for their official actions. The judge, who rejected that effort in a Dec. 16 ruling, also postponed sentencing to accommodate Trump’s presidential campaign.
In the wake of his election victory, Trump again asked the judge to dismiss the case, arguing that an elected president could not face prosecution.
Last week, Judge Merchan also rejected that offer and sought to end the delays. He wrote in an 18-page ruling that overturning the jury verdict “would immeasurably undermine the rule of law” and that “the sanctity of a jury verdict” was “a fundamental principle in our nation’s jurisprudence.”
The judge’s ruling infuriated Trump. In a series of social media posts, he sharply criticized Judge Merchan, a moderate Democrat and former prosecutor, and claimed that the judge was a “radical partisan.”
And yet, in that same ruling, Judge Merchan revealed that he planned to spare Trump any jail time. Instead, the judge signaled that he favored the so-called unconditional release of Trump’s sentence, a rare and lenient alternative to jail or probation.
That sentence, the judge wrote, “appears to be the most viable solution,” pointing out the legal and practical impossibility of imprisoning a sitting president.
Some legal experts suggested that Trump might not challenge the sentence now that his freedom was no longer at stake; Once sentenced, he is free to appeal his conviction.
But since his conviction in May, Trump has insisted that he should not face sentencing. He has also attempted to take the case to federal court, where an appeals court is still considering his request.
If the New York appeals court rejects his request for an emergency stay, Trump has other options at his disposal, including asking the federal appeals court to intervene. He could also file a series of new lawsuits in federal court in hopes of quickly reaching the Supreme Court.
It is unclear whether the Supreme Court would intervene in the case.
The high court intervened in one of Trump’s federal criminal cases and issued its landmark ruling granting presidents broad immunity for their official actions. But the New York case involves a personal and political crisis before Trump’s presidency, centered on a hush payment to a porn star during Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
Michael D. Cohen, Trump’s fixer at the time, reached the agreement with porn star Stormy Daniels in the final days of the 2016 campaign, when she was threatening to go public with her account of a sexual encounter with Trump. Triumph.
Trump, the jury concluded, then covered up his reimbursement to Cohen through payments falsely classified as ordinary legal expenses.
Matthew Haag contributed with reports.
