NEW YORK — The judge overseeing Donald Trump’s criminal case in Manhattan postponed his sentencing until after Election Day, a significant victory for the former president as he seeks to overturn his conviction and win back the White House.
In a ruling Friday, the judge, Juan M. Merchan, rescheduled the sentencing for Nov. 26, citing the “unique time frame this matter currently finds itself in.” He had previously planned to hand down Trump’s punishment Sept. 18, just seven weeks before Election Day, when Trump will face off against Vice President Kamala Harris for the presidency.
“This is not a decision this court makes lightly but it is the decision which in this court’s view, best advances the interests of justice,” Merchan wrote in the four-page ruling, which noted that “this matter is one that stands alone, in a unique place in this nation’s history.”
The judge appeared eager to skirt a swirl of partisan second-guessing in the campaign’s final stretch. Asserting that the court is a “fair, impartial and apolitical institution,” he said that “the integrity of our judicial system demands” that the sentencing be “free from distraction or distortion.”
But while his decision will avert a courtroom spectacle before the election, the delay itself could still affect its results, keeping voters in the dark about whether the Republican presidential nominee will eventually spend time behind bars.
It is unclear whether sentencing Trump in September would have helped or harmed him politically; his punishment could have been an embarrassing reminder of his criminal record but could have also propelled his claims of political martyrdom.
Merchan’s decision came at the request of Trump, who had asked to delay the sentencing, partly to win more time to challenge his conviction on charges that he falsified records to cover up a sex scandal. Prosecutors working for the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, who brought the case, had deferred to the judge, paving the way for at least a brief postponement.
The judge’s ruling Friday took a defensive tone, refusing to address some of Trump’s supporting arguments for a delay, which he described as a “litany of perceived and unsubstantiated grievances.”
He also vented frustration at Bragg’s pursuit of a middle ground, noting that despite the district attorney’s “stated neutrality,” his prosecutors’ filing had highlighted logistical challenges to a September sentencing and “seemingly supports” Trump’s bid to delay.
A spokesperson for Bragg said, “A jury of 12 New Yorkers swiftly and unanimously convicted Donald Trump of 34 felony counts,” adding that the district attorney’s office “stands ready for sentencing on the new date set by the court.”
The judge’s decision is likely to infuriate Bragg’s liberal supporters and fuel accusations that Trump is above the law, shielded from the consequences of conviction, unlike any other felon. To avoid that impression, left-leaning legal scholars — and Trump critics seeking catharsis — wanted Merchan to hold the former president accountable promptly after he was convicted in May.
Trump, the first former American president to become a felon, faces up to four years in prison. Merchan, however, could impose a shorter sentence or only probation.
Trump, who spent the morning in a federal courtroom appealing a case in which he was found liable for sexual abuse and defamation, was with his lawyers at Trump Tower when he learned of Merchan’s decision.
His campaign did not celebrate the delay. Instead, it issued a statement saying “there should be no sentencing” at all in what it called an “election interference witch hunt.”
Trump’s request to postpone had posed an unparalleled predicament for the judge, who wrote in the ruling Friday that he was still striving to treat Trump as he would any other defendant.
Trump, of course, was different: Not only was he running for president, but he also hurled insults at the judge, sought to oust him from the case and leveled personal attacks on Merchan’s daughter, a Democratic political consultant.
Merchan propelled the case forward for more than a year — even as Trump sought to thwart it at every turn — and imposed a gag order on the former president that barred him from attacking witnesses, prosecutors and the judge’s own family.
Merchan, a veteran judge who once vowed to apply “the rules of law evenhandedly,” was an unlikely deliverer of relief for the former president. Yet his ruling Friday marked Trump’s latest success in dragging out his varied legal entanglements, a strategy that has paid off in all four criminal cases looming over the former president.
In the Manhattan case, the only one of the indictments that has reached a trial, Trump’s lawyers spent months building a web of legal challenges that influenced, and at times contradicted, one another. There were pleas for delays. Requests to throw out the case. And long-shot maneuvers to switch the case to federal court.
Merchan had already delayed the sentencing once at Trump’s request, at the beginning of the convoluted process.
Trump’s lawyers had asked to postpone the sentencing, originally set for July 11, so that Merchan could consider their request to overturn the conviction based on a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision granting him broad immunity for official actions taken as president. Merchan agreed to consider their request and to move the sentencing to Sept. 18.
But when Merchan said he would rule on the immunity bid Sept. 16, two days before the sentencing, Trump’s lawyers demanded yet another delay. The lawyers, Todd Blanche and Emil Bove, had argued that the judge’s timetable was too compressed.
Merchan noted Friday that had he sentenced Trump in July as planned, “there would of course have been no cause for delay.” But Trump’s effort to apply the “historic and intervening decision” from the Supreme Court in the Manhattan case, he said, had necessitated a change.
Merchan said that he would now rule on the immunity matter, which Trump argues should reverse his conviction, on Nov. 12, a week after the election. The new schedule will all but guarantee that Trump remains a felon when voters head to the polls.
The postponement, Merchan wrote, should “dispel any suggestion that the court will have issued any decision or imposed sentence either to give an advantage to, or create a disadvantage for, any political party.”
Still, the delay will spare Trump a distraction — and humiliation — at a critical moment. Harris’ entry into the presidential race in July upended the campaign and erased the former president’s lead in the polls.
In a letter filed with the court, Trump’s lawyers implied that holding his sentencing just weeks before Election Day on Nov. 5 could improperly influence voters.
“By adjourning the sentencing until after that election — which is of paramount importance to the entire nation,” Trump’s lawyers said, “the court would reduce, even if not eliminate, issues regarding the integrity of any future proceedings.”
Prosecutors, while not opposing a delay, have said that the scheduling problems arose from Trump’s own “strategic and dilatory litigation tactics.” And they challenged Trump’s efforts to toss out the conviction based on the Supreme Court’s immunity decision, contending that the high court ruling had “no bearing” on the Manhattan prosecution and noting that Trump’s cover-up of the sex scandal was unrelated to his presidency.
“The evidence that he claims is affected by the Supreme Court’s ruling constitutes only a sliver of the mountains of testimony and documentary proof that the jury considered in finding him guilty,” the prosecutors wrote.
In May, a jury of 12 New Yorkers convicted Trump after a seven-week trial of all 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to conceal the sex scandal that threatened his 2016 presidential campaign.
The case stemmed from a hush-money payment to porn actor Stormy Daniels that Trump’s fixer, Michael Cohen, made shortly before the election. Trump eventually repaid Cohen, who became a star witness at the trial. And the former president, the jury found, carried out a scheme to use the false records to hide the nature of the reimbursement.
Soon after his conviction, Trump intensified his strategy of delay, which is something of a legal forte for the former president.
Trump had succeeded in postponing his Manhattan trial by three weeks while managing to indefinitely delay trials in Washington and in Georgia, where he is accused of plotting to subvert democracy by refusing to accept his 2020 election defeat. (The Supreme Court’s immunity ruling stems from the Washington case.) Separately, a federal judge in Florida dismissed the case in which Trump was charged with mishandling classified documents.
Other stratagems failed.
Trump recently sought to move his Manhattan case to federal court, his second attempt to do so. This time, he cited the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling. But the second attempt, like the first, was unsuccessful, with the judge again rejecting Trump’s argument that the case involved his official acts as president.
“Nothing in the Supreme Court’s opinion affects my previous conclusion that the hush money payments were private, unofficial acts, outside the bounds of executive authority,” the federal judge, Alvin K. Hellerstein, wrote in his opinion, which Trump is appealing.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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