Judge delays Donald Trump’s sentencing in hush money case until after November election

NEW YORK (AP) — A judge agreed Friday to postpone Donald Trump’s sentencing in his hush money case until after the November election, granting him a hard-won reprieve as he navigates the aftermath of his criminal conviction and the homestretch of his presidential campaign.

Manhattan Judge Juan M. Merchan, who is also weighing a defense request to overturn the verdict on immunity grounds, delayed Trump’s sentencing until Nov. 26, three weeks after the final votes are cast in the presidential election.

It had been scheduled for Sept. 18, about seven weeks before Election Day. The new date is the Tuesday before Thanksgiving.

The delay, the latest bit of good legal fortune for Trump, means the presidential election will be decided without voters knowing if the Republican nominee is going to jail.

Merchan explained in a four-page decision that he was postponing the sentencing “to avoid any appearance — however unwarranted — that the proceeding has been affected by or seeks to affect the approaching presidential election in which the Defendant is a candidate.”

“The Court is a fair, impartial, and apolitical institution,” he added, writing that his decision “should dispel any suggestion” otherwise.

Trump’s lawyers pushed for the delay on multiple fronts, petitioning the judge and asking a federal court to intervene. They argued that punishing the former president in the thick of his campaign to retake the White House would amount to election interference.

Trump’s lawyers argued that delaying his sentencing until after the election would also allow him time to weigh next steps after Merchan rules on the defense’s request to reverse his conviction and dismiss the case because of the U.S. Supreme Court’s July presidential immunity ruling.

In his order Friday, Merchan delayed a decision on that until Nov. 12.

A federal judge on Tuesday rejected Trump’s request to have the U.S. District Court in Manhattan seize the case from Merchan’s state court. Had they been successful, Trump’s lawyers said they would have then sought to have the verdict overturned and the case dismissed on immunity grounds. Trump is appealing the federal court decision and asked the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to halt postconviction proceedings. That court has not yet ruled.

Trump entered this election year facing the possibility of multiple criminal trials after he was indicted four times since March 2023. But a string of decisions in the last two months, culminating with Friday’s sentencing delay, has largely cleared his legal calendar. The hush money case is the only one to have gone to trial.

In July, a judge dismissed a federal case in Florida charging Trump with illegally hoarding classified documents. At the same time, the Supreme Court’s immunity decision has ensured significant delays in a separate federal case in Washington, D.C. in which Trump’s accused of trying to overturn his 2020 election loss. A Georgia election case also remains idled.

“There should be no sentencing in the Manhattan DA’s Election Interference Witch Hunt,” Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung said in a statement after Merchan ruled. He said all cases against Trump should be dismissed because of the Supreme Court’s decision.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office, which prosecuted the case, had not staked a position on the defense’s delay request, deferring to Merchan.

“A jury of 12 New Yorkers swiftly and unanimously convicted Donald Trump of 34 felony counts,” DA’s office spokesperson Danielle Filson said. The office, she said, “stands ready for sentencing on the new date set by the court.”

Election Day is Nov. 5, but many states allow voters to cast ballots early, with some set to start the process just a few days before or after the date Sept. 18.

Trump was convicted in May on 34 counts of falsifying business records to conceal a $130,000 hush money payment to porn actor Stormy Daniels just before the 2016 presidential election. Daniels claims she and Trump had a sexual encounter a decade earlier after they met at a celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe.

Prosecutors cast the payout as part of a Trump-driven effort to keep voters from hearing salacious stories about him during his first presidential campaign. Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen paid Daniels and was later reimbursed by Trump, whose company logged the reimbursements as legal expenses.

Trump maintains that the stories were false, that reimbursements were for legal work and logged correctly, and that the case was part of a politically motivated “witch hunt” aimed at damaging his current campaign. Bragg is a Democrat.

Democrats backing their party’s nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, have made his conviction a focus of their messaging.

In speeches at the party’s convention in Chicago last month, President Joe Biden called Trump a “convicted felon” running against a former prosecutor. Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Texas, labeled Trump a “career criminal, with 34 felonies, two impeachments and one porn star to prove it.”

Trump’s 2016 Democratic opponent, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, inspired chants of “lock him up” from the convention crowd when she quipped that Trump “fell asleep at his own trial, and when he woke up, he made his own kind of history: the first person to run for president with 34 felony convictions.”

Falsifying business records is punishable by up to four years behind bars. Other potential sentences include probation, a fine or a conditional discharge, which would require Trump to stay out of trouble to avoid additional punishment. Trump is the first ex-president convicted of a crime.

Trump’s case “stands alone, in a unique place in this Nation’s history,” Merchan wrote.

The public’s confidence “in the integrity of our judicial system demands a sentencing hearing that is entirely focused on the verdict of the jury and the weighing of aggravating and mitigating factors free from distraction or distortion,” he wrote.

Trump has pledged to appeal the verdict, but that cannot happen until he is sentenced.

In seeking the delay, Trump lawyers Todd Blanche and Emil Bove argued that the short time between the scheduled immunity ruling on Sept. 16 and sentencing, which was to have taken place two days later, was unfair to Trump.

To prepare for a Sept. 18 sentencing, the lawyers said, prosecutors would be submitting their punishment recommendation while Merchan is still weighing whether to dismiss the case. If Merchan rules against Trump, he would need “adequate time to assess and pursue state and federal appellate options,” they said.

The Supreme Court’s immunity decision reins in prosecutions of ex-presidents for official acts and restricts prosecutors in pointing to official acts as evidence that a president’s unofficial actions were illegal.

Trump’s lawyers argue that in light of the ruling, jurors in the hush money case should not have heard such evidence as former White House staffers describing how the then-president reacted to news coverage of the Daniels deal.

Michael R. Sisak And Jennifer Peltz, The Associated Press