Manhattan prosecutors are urging Judge Juan Merchan not to vacate Donald Trump’s felony conviction on charges of falsifying business records related to a 2016 hush money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels.
Merchan is currently weighing a bid from Trump’s legal team to have the case tossed out on grounds that the prosecutorial immunity granted to presidents — which was recently expanded by the Supreme Court — shields the president-elect from sentencing on his conviction. Last month, the judge indefinitely postponed Trump’s sentencing and allowed his attorneys to present their case.
In a Tuesday filing, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg wrote that while “The People acknowledge the importance of an orderly executive transition and the peaceful transfer of power,” those “interests do not require the extraordinary step of abating post-trial motion practice in a pre-existing criminal case.”
Prosecutors argue that logistical and constitutional questions of sentencing a sitting or soon-to-be president to jail time could be avoided by leveling a non-carceral punishment against Trump, or simply delaying sentencing until the end of his term.
No “principle of immunity precludes further proceedings before defendant’s inauguration. And even if judgment has not been entered at the time of defendant’s inauguration, there is no legal barrier to deferring sentencing until after defendant’s term of office concludes,” the filing argues.
“The Court could therefore conclude that presidential immunity, while not requiring dismissal, nonetheless would require a non-incarceratory sentence in these circumstances,” Bragg writes. “Such a constitutional limitation on the range of available sentences would further diminish any impact on defendant’s presidential decisionmaking without going so far as to discard the indictment and jury verdict altogether.”
A spokesperson for Trump told NBC News that the filing was “a pathetic attempt to salvage the remains of an unconstitutional and politically motivated hoax.” But, as prosecutors see it, Trump was duly convicted on 34 felony counts by a jury of his peers in a court of law.
There are no current grounds for dismissal because “president-elect immunity does not exist,” Bragg wrote. “And even after the inauguration, defendant’s temporary immunity as the sitting President will still not justify the extreme remedy of discarding the jury’s unanimous guilty verdict and wiping out the already-completed phases of this criminal proceeding.”
For their part, Trump’s attorneys are grasping at every possible straw to have the case thrown out. Earlier this month, they attempted to argue that sentencing should be dismissed on grounds that President Joe Biden’s pardon of his son, Hunter Biden, constituted an explicit condemnation of the Justice Department. Needless to say, the DOJ had little to do with New York’s case against the president-elect, and his conviction came not from a prosecutor, but 12 of his fellow New Yorkers.
