New York Judge Juan Merchan on Tuesday agreed to give Manhattan prosecutors and Donald Trump’s lawyers a week to hash out how to proceed in Trump’s hush money case now that Trump has been reelected, raising new questions of whether Trump will ever be sentenced after being convicted in May.
It’s the latest instance where Trump’s resounding victory last week has wiped away the likelihood that he will face legal repercussions after being indicted four times last year.
Any sentencing for Trump’s criminal conviction in May in New York is in jeopardy. Special counsel Jack Smith is in talks with Justice Department leadership about how to end the federal cases against Trump. The Georgia election subversion case continues to be delayed due to legal fights over the status of Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis. And a Trump-appointed federal judge threw out the charges against Trump for mishandling classified documents.
Trump’s lawyers and the Manhattan district attorney’s office agreed to delay activity in the hush money case until Tuesday, November 19, in order to give the president-elect’s lawyers and the district attorney’s office time to make new arguments on how Trump’s election victory impacts the case.
Merchan was expected to rule Tuesday on whether to overturn the business fraud conviction based on this summer’s Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity.
Instead, both sides agreed to a motion to delay existing deadlines.
“The people agree that these are unprecedented circumstances and the arguments raised by defense counsel in correspondence to the People on Friday require careful consideration to ensure that any further steps in this proceeding appropriately balance the competing interests of (1) a jury verdict of guilt following a trial that has the presumption of regularity; and (2) the Office of the President,” prosecutor Matthew Colangelo wrote to the judge.
Trump’s attorney Emil Bove argued in correspondence posted by the court Tuesday that the charges against Trump should be dismissed.
“The stay, and dismissal, are necessary to avoid unconstitutional impediments to President Trump’s ability to govern,” Bove wrote.
Merchan had been set to rule Tuesday on Trump’s motion to vacate his conviction on 34 counts of falsifying business records after the US Supreme Court determined in June that Trump should receive broad immunity for official acts during his time in office.
The issue has successfully helped Trump twice delay his sentencing. The Supreme Court’s immunity decision also indefinitely tied up Trump’s federal election subversion case in Washington, DC.
Trump argues that the charges should be dismissed – or at least his conviction should be vacated – because the district attorney’s office relied on evidence related to his official acts as president during his first term that should not have been presented to the jury at trial.
The Manhattan district attorney “violated the Presidential immunity doctrine and the Supremacy Clause by relying on evidence relating to President Trump’s official acts in 2017 and 2018 to unfairly prejudice President Trump in this unprecedented and unfounded prosecution relating to purported business records,” Trump’s attorneys wrote in July. “Much of the unconstitutional official-acts evidence concerned actions taken pursuant to ‘core’ Executive power for which ‘absolute’ immunity applies.”
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office has said Trump’s conviction should stand and that the evidence presented at trial was “overwhelming.”
Prosecutors argue that the Supreme Court’s ruling on evidence does not apply to this case because the crimes Trump was convicted of – falsifying business records to interfere in the 2016 presidential election – were not “official acts” as president.
In court filings, Trump’s lawyers argued that testimony at trial – including from White House aides Hope Hicks and Madeleine Westerhout – and tweets Trump sent while president should not have come before the jury.
The jury should not have heard any testimony from Hope Hicks about events in 2018 when she was the White House Communications Director, Trump’s lawyers argued. The Supreme Court ruling “specifically forbids prosecutors from offering ‘testimony’ from a President’s ‘advisers’ for the purpose of ‘probing the official act,’” his attorneys wrote.
Trump’s lawyers have also said that while president, Trump used his Twitter account as “one of the White House’s main vehicles for conducting official business,” so they said tweets from Trump’s official social media account – like a series of 2018 posts denying the Stormy Daniels hush money scheme – should not have been presented as evidence at trial.
Prosecutors responded by arguing that Trump’s attorneys didn’t raise objections during the trial to most of the evidence they now question, and so they couldn’t now challenge it after the trial.
This story has been updated with additional developments.
