A crucial decision about presidential immunity will not be handed down until two days prior to Donald Trump’s scheduled sentence, according to the judge in his hush money trial.
The deadline for the immunity ruling was September 6, and the sentence was scheduled for September 18. However, last week, attorneys representing Trump requested that Judge Juan M. Merchan rule on their reintroduced motion to remove Merchan from the lawsuit.
Following his decision next week over his potential recusal, Judge Juan M. Merchan has decided to delay the immunity ruling until September 16th, according to a letter that was made public on Tuesday.
In court on September 18, for “the imposition of sentence or other proceedings as appropriate,” the Republican presidential candidate must still appear, according to Merchan.
No comments were made by the Manhattan district attorney’s office or Trump’s lawyer, Todd Blanche.
In May, a jury convicted Trump guilty of conspiring to conceal an agreement to pay off porn actor Stormy Daniels through the falsification of business papers, which occurred just before the 2016 election. She was thinking about coming out about a sexual encounter she had with Trump ten years ago.
Trump’s business recorded the repayment of his former lawyer Michael Cohen as legal expenditures, and Cohen was subsequently reimbursed by Trump. That, according to the prosecution, was an attempt to cover up the hush money deal’s real origin and the transactions’ actual character.
Trump rejects Daniels’ allegation, insists he is innocent, and claims the investigation is driven by political motives. Liberal Alvin Bragg is the district attorney for Manhattan.
According to Trump’s legal team, the hush money case should be dismissed totally and the guilty conviction should be reversed because of the Supreme Court’s decision on presidential immunity in July. In addition, the defense frequently claims that some pieces of evidence, including as statements made by Trump associates in the White House and tweets he made during his presidency in 2018, were excluded from the trial because they were “tainted” by the high court’s decision.
The decision by the highest court limits the ability of prosecutors to use a former president’s official conduct as proof that their unofficial behaviors were unlawful, and it also limits the prosecution of former presidents for such crimes.
Since the hush money case concerns non-official actions to which the ex-president is not exempt, the Manhattan district attorney’s office argues that the high court’s decision “has no bearing” on it.
Last week, Trump’s legal team urged Merchan to step down from the case for the third time, citing concerns about his impartiality raised by his daughter’s work for Vice President Kamala Harris’ 2020 presidential campaign. The Democratic Party has nominated Harris to run for president.
Last year, Merchan denied the defense’s two earlier pleas for recusal, calling their arguments “hypothetical” and founded on “innuendos” and “unsupported speculation.”
However, Trump’s attorney Todd Blanche claimed that the judge hadn’t provided sufficient clarity in addressing those issues, and that Harris’s involvement in the presidential race makes them “even more concrete.”
Among the four criminal prosecutions filed against Trump in 2017, one is the hush money case.
The federal court rejected an accusation last month that Trump unlawfully kept secret records at his Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago. The plea has been filed by the Justice Department.
The remaining cases, which involve Trump’s attempts to reverse his 2020 election loss in federal and Georgia state courts, will not be ready to proceed to trial prior to the November election.