NEW YORK (AP) — In an extraordinary turn, a judge Friday set President-elect Donald Trump’s sentencing in his hush-money case for Jan. 10 — little over a week before he’s due to return to the White House — but indicated he wouldn’t be jailed.
The development nevertheless leaves Trump on course to be the first president to take office convicted of felony crimes.
Judge Juan M. Merchan, who presided over Trump’s trial, signaled in a written decision that he’d sentence the former and future president to what’s known as a conditional discharge, in which a case gets dismissed if a defendant avoids rearrest.
Merchan rejected Trump’s push to dismiss the verdict and throw out the case on presidential immunity grounds and because of his impending return to the White House. The judge said he found “no legal impediment to sentencing” Trump and that it was “incumbent” on him to sentence Trump prior to his swearing in on Jan. 20.
“Only by bringing finality to this matter” will the interests of justice be served, Merchan wrote.
Trump was convicted in May of 34 counts of falsifying business records.
They involved an alleged scheme to hide a hush money payment to porn actor Stormy Daniels in the last weeks of Trump’s first campaign in 2016. The payout was made to keep her from publicizing claims she’d had sex with the married Trump years earlier. He says that her story is false and that he did nothing wrong.
This story by Aaron Cantrell reminds me of my first school in Dyersburg, TN. I was a student at Bruce School from Kindergarten to second grade until the school system was integrated. My parents graduated from this K-12 school in 1960 in one of the city's African American communities. After sitting empty for several years, part of the school was demolished while the rest was renovated and now serves as a community center for the Bruce community in Dyersburg. A local pastor is now trying to do something similar in the Cemetery community in Rutherford Co.
-Lelan Statom
