2024-12-17 07:32:00
A Manhattan district judge on Monday rejected President-elect Donald Trump’s request to throw out his conviction The Stormy Daniels case by virtue of the recent Supreme Court ruling granting broad immunity to presidents in the exercise of their office. The future of the case remains uncertain, the sentence of which should have been made public shortly after the November elections, after the Prosecutor’s Office had recommended suspending – and not canceling – the sentence precisely because of the aforementioned Supreme Court ruling. Trump’s lawyers argued that having the case pending during his presidency would hinder his ability to govern.
Judge Juan Merchan’s decision rules out a possible final closure of the case before Trump returns to the White House on January 20, when he takes office. However, his lawyers made other arguments in support of the dismissal. The prosecution’s proposal to freeze the sentence during his presidency does not even imply its dismissal. On November 22, the judge postponed sentencing indefinitely, but allowed the president-elect’s defense to again ask that the case be dismissed.
Trump was found guilty in May of all 34 charges against him for paying a bribe to a porn actress to buy her silence. At the center of the case is the falsification of accounting documents of his company, the Trump Organization, to disguise the payment of $130,000 to Daniels, an adult film actress, in 2016, with the aim of silencing a extramarital affair, which he has always denied, and whose revelation, in the last stretch of the electoral campaign that brought him to the White House for the first time, would probably have harmed his interests.
Him The Stormy Daniels case It was the only court of four criminal cases the Republican had faced since 2023 before the November election. Aside from his unquestionable victory at the polls – a triple victory, since the Republicans obtained the presidency but also control of both houses -, it was the decision adopted on July 1 by the Supreme Court – a court chosen at its own discretion , which helped clear Trump’s path to the presidency of legal obstacles. When archiving the call case of the Mar-a-Lago documents —confidential documents that Trump removed from the White House in January 2021—, also thanks to a judge appointed by the Republican in his first term, followed the decision of special prosecutor Jack Smith to withdraw the two criminal charges he was holding against the Republican, the Georgia cases (coup attempt) and the assault on the Capitol.
The president-elect’s judicial landscape was thus clear when the Justice Department concluded that he could not be tried after winning the election, but the New York case carried additional complexity: having already been tried and convicted. This is why Judge Merchan now inflicts a relative disadvantage on the president-elect, despite the fact that the ruling will theoretically not be read for at least four years.
A month after the ruling of The Stormy Daniels casethe Supreme Court has ruled that former presidents cannot be prosecuted for official acts and that prosecutors cannot cite such actions to support a case centered on purely personal, unofficial conduct. Trump’s lawyers used the Supreme Court’s decision to argue that the jury in the case had obtained some inappropriate evidence, such as Trump’s presidential financial disclosure form, testimony from White House aides and social media posts made while was in charge.
Merchan on Monday rejected most of Trump’s lawyers’ claims that some of prosecutors’ evidence was linked to official records and implicated immunity protections. The judge said that even if some evidence was related to his official conduct, he would still find that prosecutors’ decision to use “these documents as evidence of decidedly personal acts of falsification of accounting documents poses no danger of intrusion into authority . “and the function of the executive power.”
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