Donald Trump’s long-anticipated and twice-delayed court sentencing in New York is now, officially, off.
Trump will almost certainly head back to the White House as a convicted felon — who somehow escaped any consequence for faking business records.
At trial, prosecutors made the case that Trump had an extramarital affair with porn star Stormy Daniels, used his lawyer Michael Cohen to funnel a $130,000 hush money payment to silence her before the 2016 presidential election, and then reimbursed Cohen for sham legal work. A jury of 12 New Yorkers concluded Trump was guilty of all 34 counts of making false business filings that prosecutors brought against him.
Trump was supposed to be sentenced next Tuesday, facing significant jail time, a costly fine, home confinement or even community service. In such a unique criminal case with a one-of-a-kind defendant, any punishment was possible.
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But on Friday morning, the judge who oversaw the two-month trial in the spring made the decision to “stay the sentencing” without putting a replacement date on the calendar. Due to new pending issues in the case, the post-verdict legal fight will now devolve into relitigating the most basic aspects of the trial — one that could travel up and down appellate courts for the foreseeable future.
In his order on Friday, New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan instead set the case on a different track, allowing Trump’s team to argue the matter should be dismissed based on Trump’s special status as an incoming president. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg Jr. will have time to push back on that idea in early December.
Merchan also put off making his own decision on whether the Supreme Court’s decision in July to grant Trump an expansive new definition of presidential immunity for official acts somehow poisons the trial that concluded in May, given that jurors heard evidence about how Trump signed Cohen’s checks from the Oval Office.
Local prosecutors had already effectively paused the case to fight off these two avenues of attack, but Bragg has also indicated his team will continue fighting to keep the jury’s guilty verdict intact — even if that means a four-year freeze that picks this back up when Trump is done with his second term as president in 2029.
Trump would be 83.
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Jose Pagliery is a reporter at NOTUS.
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