The Supreme Court declined to halt President-elect Donald Trump’s Friday morning criminal sentencing in the New York state hush money case, allowing the historic proceeding to go forward over dissent from four Republican appointees.
Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh indicated they would have sided with Trump. That means Chief Justice John Roberts, who authored the immunity ruling in Trump’s favor last year, and Trump appointee Amy Coney Barrett were in the majority along with the three Democratic appointees.
In an unsigned order Thursday evening, the high court explained why it declined to side with Trump, spelling out two reasons:
First, the alleged evidentiary violations at President-Elect Trump’s state-court trial can be addressed in the ordinary course on appeal. Second, the burden that sentencing will impose on the President-Elect’s responsibilities is relatively insubstantial in light of the trial court’s stated intent to impose a sentence of “unconditional discharge” after a brief virtual hearing.
The president-elect had sought to halt further proceedings in the case, citing the court’s decision last year in the federal election interference case that granted him broad criminal immunity. In the state case that’s the subject of Thursday’s Supreme Court order, Trump was found guilty at trial last year of falsifying business records in connection with a hush money scheme related to the 2016 election. It’s the only one of the four prosecutions of Trump that went to trial.
Earlier on Thursday, New York’s top state court rejected a separate bid from Trump to block his sentencing.
Opposing Trump’s Supreme Court attempt, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office said the president-elect asked the justices “to take the extraordinary step of intervening in a pending state criminal trial to prevent the scheduled sentencing from taking place — before final judgment has been entered by the trial court, and before any direct appellate review of defendant’s conviction.” There’s “no basis for such intervention,” Bragg argued.
Incarceration isn’t mandatory in the New York case, and, as the Supreme Court’s order noted, Judge Juan Merchan has signaled that he doesn’t intend to impose jail time on Trump, who is set to be inaugurated Jan. 20. Following his May trial loss, he was set to be sentenced July 11 last year, before the July 1 immunity ruling kicked off a series of postponements. Merchan set the current date for Friday while rejecting Trump’s attempt to get the case dismissed before sentencing. The federal election interference case was also supposed to go to trial last year. Trump’s pretrial immunity appeal helped him delay that one through the election, after which special counsel Jack Smith moved to dismiss the case, citing the Justice Department’s policy against prosecuting sitting presidents. Smith similarly dropped his appeal bid to reinstate charges against Trump in the classified documents case dismissed by Trump-appointed U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon. Trump also got good news in his fourth criminal case last month when a divided Georgia state appeals court panel said the prosecutor who brought the case should be disqualified, putting that case’s fate in question though not officially killing it for good. Presidents can’t pardon away or have state cases dismissed as they can federal ones. Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for expert analysis on the top legal stories of the week, including updates from the Supreme Court and developments in Donald Trump’s legal cases.
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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