On a Tuesday, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office concurred to delay the impending sentencing of incoming President Donald Trump relating to his unprecedented felony culpability in a case of hush money, pending the assessment of a potential dismissal of the conviction centered on a presidential immunity assertion. Trump’s defense team has been granted this postponement, originally planned for November 26, to put forth their arguments centering on the absolution of Trump’s felony conviction on the grounds of presidential invulnerability.
The belief of the prosecution is that the court proceedings should be momentarily halted to permit the defendant’s upcoming motion to dismiss to be contested. Contrarily, the district attorney’s office indicated its intent to refute the defense’s attempts to nullify the jury’s condemning verdict against Trump.
Their contention is that there exists no law presently that purports that a president’s provisional exemption from prosecution necessitates the termination of a post-trial criminal motion that was instigated during a period when the defendant had no such immunity from legal repercussions, and that originates from unofficial conduct for which the defendant also lacks immunity.
Under the current laws, it is suggested that the court is obligated to measure and administer competing constitutional rights in a manner that upholds both the autonomy of the executive office and the dignity of the judicial system. The consequences of Trump’s potential sentencing could see him facing up to four years of jail time.
Nevertheless, theories have been propagated by a selection of legal experts expressing that Trump, who holds a clean criminal record, is more likely to receive a probationary sentence. In his ground-breaking case adjudicated in May, Trump was criminally convicted on 34 counts of deliberately manipulating company documentation to conceal payments of $130,000 instigated as hush money.
The funds were distributed to an adult film actress with whom he allegedly had a clandestine sexual relationship, an act the prosecution argued Trump was extremely keen to hide from the US populace during his presidential campaign for the 2016 election cycle. Trump thus became the first president-elect or ex-president to be found guilty of criminal activities.
This conviction also marked him as the first former president to have been found to be in contempt of court for disobeying a court order that banned him from making public statements concerning court personnel or jurors. Intriguingly, the trial presented earlier in the year divulged allegations by prosecutors that Trump conspired to commit a crime intended to seize the presidential election somewhat two months after declaring his inaugural presidential run in June 2015.
This was performed by executing a series of ‘catch and kill’ strategies, by remunerating individuals claiming to have detrimental narratives about Trump. This was accomplished cooperatively with his personal attorney at that time, and a tabloid publisher.
Payment details revealed show that $130,000 was paid to the adult film actress, while an additional $150,000 was expended on a previous Playboy model who also claimed to have engaged in an extramarital affair with Trump. Moreover, a door attendant at Trump Tower, who had marketed a fabricated story alleging that Trump had fathered an illegitimate child, received a hush money amount of $30,000.
The prosecution pleaded that the money was unlawfully documented in the Trump Organization’s records as legal services in accordance with a retainer agreement. However, neither the actual retainer agreement nor the mentioned legal services ever appeared to be in existence.