Supreme Court refuses to delay Trump’s hush money sentencing
President-elect Donald Trump can be sentenced Friday in his New York hush-money case, the Supreme Court said in a 5-4 ruling.
The high court on Thursday rejected Trump's emergency request to delay the proceeding, setting the stage for him to be sentenced just days before he is inaugurated on January 20 for a second term.
Four conservative justices — Supreme Court refuses to delay Trump’s hush money sentencing Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh — said they would have granted Trump's request. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined the court's three liberals in voting against Trump.
Judge Juan Merchan, the New York judge presiding over Trump's trial, had set Friday morning to sentence the former president in the case but has indicated that Trump will be neither penalized nor incarcerated.
The sentencing hearing is set for Friday at 9:30 a.m. Trump will testify virtually, said a person with knowledge of the plans, from Mar-a-Lago.
The court, in a brief, one-paragraph statement, said that some of Trump's concerns could be handled "in the ordinary course on appeal." The court also reasoned that the burden sentencing would impose on Trump's responsibilities is "relatively insubstantial" in light of the trial court's stated intent to impose no penalty.
The president-elect's appeal to the US Supreme Court was extraordinary because the justices rarely consider a state criminal case before all appeals in state courts are fully exhausted. Trump's underlying challenge to his conviction is still pending, and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg argued the Supreme Court didn't have jurisdiction to even consider the emergency request to delay the sentencing.
Trump was convicted in May of falsifying business records over payments to his then-lawyer Michael Cohen to reimburse a $130,000 hush money payment made to adult film star Stormy Daniels, to keep her from speaking out about an alleged affair before the 2016 election. (Trump has denied the affair.)
The new president, who will be sworn in in less than two weeks, is fighting his conviction. He says it should be tossed because a conservative majority of the Supreme Court in July ruled that former presidents are entitled to sweeping immunity for official actions.
Part of Trump's argument was that his trial included evidence involving official actions from his time in office, which under the Supreme Court's immunity decision, would ordinarily be barred from reaching a jury. Prosecutors countered that those concerns could be hashed out on appeal.
Merchan rejected that argument in December, ruling that the evidence presented by the Manhattan district attorney's office was not related to Trump's official conduct as president.
This. This, the lawyers argued before the Supreme Court, is what taking a huge chunk out of Trump's time and shifting away from the process of taking power would do, posing a serious risk to national security.
"Defending criminal litigation at all stages – especially, as here, defending a criminal sentencing – is uniquely taxing and burdensome to a criminal defendant," they argued before the high court.
"President Trump is busy with the most important and sensitive work of getting ready to take the executive power in less than two weeks, all of which are critical to the national security and vital interests of the United States," they wrote.
New York prosecutors scoffed at that argument in their own filing Thursday.
"There is strong public interest in this case for the courts to proceed with sentencing proceedings," Bragg argued before the High Court. "Defendant has provided no record support for his claim that his duties as President-elect foreclose him from virtually attending a sentencing that will likely take no more than an hour."
In a final filing Thursday, Trump argued that the case involved concerns of "great national importance" and that "the constitutional structure, and the nation" would be "irreparably harmed by letting the sentencing go forward."
Alito recusal calls
The Supreme Court found itself in another ethics controversy after President-elect Donald Trump spoke by phone with Justice Samuel Alito this week, just before an appeal was filed by Trump's lawyers.
House Speaker Paul Ryan, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell requested Thursday that Justice Samuel Alito recuse himself from the case.
"Justice Alito's decision to have a personal phone call with President Trump — who obviously has an active and deeply personal matter before the court — makes clear that he fundamentally misunderstands the basic requirements of judicial ethics or, more likely, believes himself to be above judicial ethics altogether," said Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin.
The decision of when recusal is proper is left entirely up to the Justices themselves and occurs very seldom.
Their conversation did not include a discussion about the sentencing dispute. Nor, Alito added in a statement Wednesday, did the two discuss "any other matter that is pending or might in the future come before the Supreme Court or any past Supreme Court decisions involving the President-elect,".
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