President-elect Donald Trump said the sentencing hearing in his bribery case in New York was a “despicable sham” and he plans to appeal his conviction. The Republican was sentenced on Friday, but the judge refused to impose any punishment.
President-elect Donald Trump was sentenced Friday in his bribery case, but the judge declined to impose any punishment, a result that cements his conviction but frees him to return to the White House without the threat of a prison sentence or a sentence. fine.
Trump's ruling of unconditional acquittal brings to an end a rule-breaking case in which the former president, now president-elect, was charged with 34 felonies, tried for nearly two months, and convicted by a jury on each count. However, the legal detour – and the sordid details aired in court about a plot to cover up allegations of affairs – did him no harm with voters, who elected him to a second term.
Trump, dressed in a dark suit and sitting next to one of his lawyers with an American flag in the background, appeared on a video screen as he again insisted that he had committed no crime.
“It has been a political witch hunt. “It was done to damage my reputation so that I would lose the election and obviously that didn't work,” Trump said.
Trump called the case “weaponizing the government” and “a disgrace to New York.”
After it ended, Trump said in a post on his social media site that the hearing had been a “despicable sham” and that he planned to appeal his conviction.
Manhattan Judge Juan M. Merchan could have sentenced the 78-year-old Republican to up to four years in prison. Instead, he chose a ruling that sidestepped thorny constitutional issues by effectively ending the case but ensured that Trump will become the first person convicted of a serious crime to assume the presidency.
Merchan said that, as when facing any other defendant, he must consider aggravating factors before imposing a sentence, but the legal protection Trump will have as president “is a factor that takes precedence over all others.”
“Despite the extraordinary breadth of those legal protections, one power they do not provide is that they do not overturn the jury's verdict,” Merchan said.
The hush money case accused him of falsifying his business records to conceal a $130,000 payment to porn actress Stormy Daniels. She was paid, at the end of Trump's 2016 campaign, not to tell the public about a sexual encounter she claims the two had a decade earlier. Trump has reiterated that nothing of a sexual nature happened between them, and maintains that his political opponents made up a false accusation to try to harm him.
“I have never falsified business records. “This is a false and fabricated allegation,” the Republican president-elect wrote on his Truth Social platform last week. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, whose office brought the charges, is a Democrat.
Bragg's office said in a court filing Monday that Trump committed “serious crimes that caused extensive harm to the sanctity of the electoral process and the integrity of the New York financial market.”
While the specific charges concerned checks and ledgers, the underlying allegations were sordid and deeply entangled with Trump's political rise. Prosecutors said Daniels received payments (through Trump's personal lawyer at the time, Michael Cohen) as part of a broader effort to prevent voters from learning about Trump's alleged extramarital escapades.