Manhattan prosecutors on Tuesday told the judge presiding over President-elect Donald Trump’s criminal hush money case they concede he may need to consider pushing back sentencing until Trump is out of office — but they plan to fight Trump’s renewed efforts to get the verdict tossed.
In a court filing, prosecutors asked state Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan to set a schedule to consider Trump’s expected new motion to dismiss the case, including a Dec. 9 deadline for them to respond.
In light of Trump’s election victory, they said several factors needed to be considered, “such as deferral of all remaining criminal proceedings until after the end of Defendant’s upcoming presidential term,” in 2029.
“The People deeply respect the Office of the President, are mindful of the demands and obligations of the presidency, and acknowledge that Defendant’s inauguration will
raise unprecedented legal questions,” prosecutors wrote.
“We also deeply respect the fundamental role of the jury in our constitutional system.”
Lawyers for Trump, who succeeded at getting his sentencing pushed back twice in the months before the election, asked prosecutors the week before last to agree to delay proceedings and consider moving to drop the case since Trump had been reelected.
Merchan granted a joint application from both sides to delay all deadlines in the case, which included his decision on Trump’s outstanding motion to throw out the case based on the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity ruling and sentencing.
“[To] state what should be obvious, Justice Merchan cannot impose any restrictions whatsoever on President Trump prior to or during his second term in office. Thus, even if there was to be a sentencing — despite DANY’s violations of Presidential immunity in grand jury proceedings and at trial, as well as other Constitutional and legal errors — it could not take place until late-January 2029,” Trump’s lawyers wrote to Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg last week in a filing made public Tuesday.
A jury on May 30 found Trump, 78, guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying New York business records stemming from his payback to Michael Cohen for silencing Stormy Daniels in the leadup to the 2016 election. Cohen’s payments to Daniels bought her silence about an alleged extramarital encounter with Trump at a Lake Tahoe golf tournament in 2006, shortly after he wed Melania.
Daniels took the stand at the trial, in riveting testimony telling jurors the sex was consensual but unwanted, occurring when she was 27 and Trump was 60, noting he was “probably older than my father.”
She said Trump’s bodyguard, Keith Schiller, invited her for dinner with Trump and that after an hours-long conversation in his hotel room — in which Trump asked her whether porn stars had labor unions and health insurance — she walked out of the bathroom to find him splayed across the bed half-dressed.
Jurors heard the payment was one of three made to bury unflattering coverage about Trump, with the others going to former Playboy model Karen McDougal, who has long alleged she had a nearly yearlong affair with Trump, and a former Trump Tower doorman, who claimed Trump had fathered a child out of wedlock with a maid.
Supermarket tabloid publisher David Pecker, over several days on the witness stand, said the hush-money scheme was devised a year out from the election between him, Trump and Cohen, when he agreed to hunt for stories brewing that could hurt Trump’s candidacy to buy and bury them, in addition to running hit jobs on his competitors in the race, which received creative input from Cohen.
Trump was required to attend the whole trial. The verdicts rendered him the first U.S. president in the nation’s history to be found guilty of committing crimes.