In their latest delay bid, Donald Trump’s lawyers want Judge Juan Merchan to push the former president’s New York sentencing to some time after the presidential election. Among the reasons they cite in a letter dated Wednesday is the Supreme Court’s ruling that granted at least some presidential immunity in criminal cases.
It seems unlikely that Merchan, who just rejected Trump’s latest request for the judge to recuse himself, will agree to another adjournment. The immunity ruling already led the judge to push Trump’s sentencing from July to Sept. 18. Merchan is set to rule on Sept. 16 on Trump’s motion to set aside his guilty verdicts (rendered in May, prior to the July 1 immunity decision) on the grounds that they run afoul of the Supreme Court’s new immunity rule. If Merchan rejects Trump’s motion, then that would clear the way for sentencing two days later.
But if Merchan rules against Trump’s immunity claim, then the Republican presidential candidate’s lawyers have signaled that they want to appeal such an adverse decision before Trump is sentenced. “A single business day is an unreasonably short period of time for President Trump to seek to vindicate these rights, if he must,” they write. They argue that an adjournment is necessary “to allow President Trump adequate time to assess and pursue state and federal appellate options in response to any adverse ruling.”
The letter notes that the immunity ruling, which arose in the federal election interference case, happened in a pre-trial posture and that the Supreme Court said that immunity issues are appealable pre-trial. “It follows that any denial of the pending motion is immediately appealable in a similar procedural posture,” Trump’s lawyers write.
However, the New York case is different because Trump was already found guilty before the Supreme Court made its decision on immunity. So this case is in a post-trial posture, not pre-trial. Nonetheless, his lawyers argue in their letter that until the prosecution’s “immunity violations are addressed fully and finally, this Court may not ‘adjudicate’ the matter — including at sentencing.” Trump lawyers Todd Blanche and Emil Bove also write that an adjournment is necessary to prevent prosecutors from filing their sentencing position to the court while the immunity issue is pending. They argue that prosecutors “should not be permitted to file a public sentencing submission that will include what the Supreme Court described as the ‘threat of punishment,’ in a manner that is personally and politically prejudicial to President Trump and his family, and harmful to the institution of the Presidency as a result of the type of ‘peculiar public opprobrium’ associated with these proceedings that troubled the Trump Court.” Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for updates and expert analysis on the top legal stories. The newsletter will return to its regular weekly schedule when the Supreme Court’s next term kicks off in October.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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