New York’s highest court on Thursday rejected Donald Trump’s effort to stop his sentencing from going ahead in 24 hours, leaving the matter in the hands of the Supreme Court.
In a letter to Trump’s attorney, Todd Blanche, a New York Court of Appeals clerk said Associate Judge Jenny Rivera had reviewed a proposed order that Trump’s side submitted Wednesday seeking to halt the sentencing and had declined to sign it. Prosecutors from the Manhattan district attorney’s office had opposed the request.
Trump is now waiting to see if the Supreme Court will intervene at his behest and stop the proceeding from going forward on Friday.
In prosecutors’ response Thursday, the Manhattan DA asked the court to deny the effort and said there was no basis for the high court’s intervention.
“[Defendant] makes the unprecedented claim that the temporary presidential immunity he will possess in the future fully immunizes him now, weeks before he even takes the oath of office, from all state-court criminal process,” the filing read.
“This extraordinary immunity claim is unsupported by any decision from any court. It is axiomatic that there is only one President at a time.”
Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan, who presided over the trial, unexpectedly scheduled the proceeding to take place on Friday at 9:30 a.m. in a decision last week that upheld the guilty verdicts against Trump.
He said that the president-elect could appear by video and that he was inclined to sentence him to an unconditional discharge, meaning he would not face jail time, fines, or probation.
Though Trump is not expected to face any form of punishment, the sentencing would finalize his conviction and officially classify him as a convicted felon just 10 days before his second presidential term begins, a first in history.
Trump’s appeals to New York’s Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court came after a lower-level New York appeals court rejected his lawyer’s demands to halt the sentencing Tuesday and appeared heavily skeptical of the argument that Trump has presidential immunity as a president-in-waiting.
The emergency petition Trump’s lawyers submitted to the Supreme Court Wednesday said the president-elect was “already suffering grave irreparable injury from the disruption and distraction that the trial court abruptly inflicted by suddenly scheduling a sentencing hearing for the President-Elect of the United States, on five days’ notice, at the apex of the Presidential transition.” They argued that Merchan wrongly refused to recognize Trump’s immunity during the trial and in trying to sentence him during his transition.
A jury on May 30 found Trump, 78, guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records stemming from a scheme to hide embarrassing details about his past from voters in 2016 that violated New York election law.
The case centered on payments he made to Cohen during his first year in the White House, which reimbursed his longtime former fixer for paying off porn star Stormy Daniels to silence her claims of a sordid sexual encounter with Trump in 2006.
The Manhattan case was the only one of four brought against Trump after his first term that made it before a jury.
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