Trump to be Sentenced in Money Case    01/10 06:12

   

   NEW YORK (AP) -- In a singular moment in U.S. history, President-elect 
Donald Trump faces sentencing Friday for his New York hush money conviction 
after the nation's highest court refused to intervene.

   Like so much else in the criminal case and the current American political 
landscape, the scenario set to unfold in an austere Manhattan courtroom was 
unimaginable only a few years ago. A state judge is to say what consequences, 
if any, the country's former and soon-to-be leader will face for felonies that 
a jury found he committed.

   With Trump 10 days from inauguration, Judge Juan M. Merchan has indicated he 
plans a no-penalty sentence called an unconditional discharge, and prosecutors 
aren't opposing it. That would mean no jail time, no probation and no fines 
would be imposed, but nothing is final until Friday's proceeding is done.

   Regardless of the outcome, Trump, a Republican, will become the first person 
convicted of a felony to assume the presidency.

   Trump, who is expected to appear by video from his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm 
Beach, Florida, will have the opportunity to speak. He has pilloried the case, 
the only one of his four criminal indictments that has gone to trial and 
possibly the only one that ever will.

   The judge has indicated that he plans the unconditional discharge -- a 
rarity in felony convictions -- partly to avoid complicated constitutional 
issues that would arise if he imposed a penalty that overlapped with Trump's 
presidency.

   The hush money case accused Trump of fudging his business' records to veil a 
$130,000 payoff to porn actor Stormy Daniels. She was paid, late in Trump's 
2016 campaign, not to tell the public about a sexual encounter she maintains 
the two had a decade earlier. He says nothing sexual happened between them, and 
he contends that his political adversaries spun up a bogus prosecution to try 
to damage him.

   "I never falsified business records. It is a fake, made up charge," the 
Republican president-elect wrote on his Truth Social platform last week. 
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, whose office brought the charges, is a 
Democrat.

   Bragg's office said in a court filing Monday that Trump committed "serious 
offenses that caused extensive harm to the sanctity of the electoral process 
and to the integrity of New York's financial marketplace."

   While the specific charges were about checks and ledgers, the underlying 
accusations were seamy and deeply entangled with Trump's political rise. 
Prosecutors said Daniels was paid off -- through Trump's personal attorney at 
the time, Michael Cohen -- as part of a wider effort to keep voters from 
hearing about Trump's alleged extramarital escapades.

   Trump denies the alleged encounters occurred. His lawyers said he wanted to 
squelch the stories to protect his family, not his campaign. And while 
prosecutors said Cohen's reimbursements for paying Daniels were deceptively 
logged as legal expenses, Trump says that's simply what they were.

   "There was nothing else it could have been called," he wrote on Truth Social 
last week, adding, "I was hiding nothing."

   Trump's lawyers tried unsuccessfully to forestall a trial. Since his May 
conviction on 34 counts of falsifying business records, they have pulled 
virtually every legal lever within reach to try to get the conviction 
overturned, the case dismissed or at least the sentencing postponed.

   They have made various arguments to Merchan, New York appeals judges, and 
federal courts including the Supreme Court. The Trump attorneys have leaned 
heavily into assertions of presidential immunity from prosecution, and they got 
a boost in July from a Supreme Court decision that affords former 
commanders-in-chief considerable immunity.

   Trump was a private citizen and presidential candidate when Daniels was paid 
in 2016. He was president when the reimbursements to Cohen were made and 
recorded the following year.

   On one hand, Trump's defense argued that immunity should have kept jurors 
from hearing some evidence, such as testimony about some of his conversations 
with then-White House communications director Hope Hicks.

   And after Trump won this past November's election, his lawyers argued that 
the case had to be scrapped to avoid impinging on his upcoming presidency and 
his transition to the Oval Office.

   Merchan, a Democrat, repeatedly postponed the sentencing, initially set for 
July. But last week, he set Friday's date, citing a need for "finality." He 
wrote that he strove to balance Trump's need to govern, the Supreme Court's 
immunity ruling, the respect due a jury verdict and the public's expectation 
that "no one is above the law."

   Trump's lawyers then launched a flurry of last-minute efforts to block the 
sentencing. Their last hope vanished Thursday night with a 5-4 Supreme Court 
ruling that declined to delay the sentencing.

   Meanwhile, the other criminal cases that once loomed over Trump have ended 
or stalled ahead of trial.

   After Trump's election, special counsel Jack Smith closed out the federal 
prosecutions over Trump's handling of classified documents and his efforts to 
overturn his 2020 election loss to Democrat Joe Biden. A state-level Georgia 
election interference case is locked in uncertainty after prosecutorFaniWillis 
was removed from it.