It is both a very light and very serious sentence. A New York judge this Friday sentenced Donald Trump as the author of 34 crimes of falsification of invoices, checks and accounting records in order to hide payments of $130,000 to porn film actress Stormy Daniels – so that she would remain silent and would not harm his electoral options in the 2016 presidential elections. As expected, the sentence dictates unconditional exemption: there is no jail time, no probation, not even a fine. At the same time, he certifies his crimes. In some way, the judge condemns Trump to be the first criminal president.
The president-elect has appeared by videoconference at the hearing, in which the prosecutors in the case have shown their agreement with leaving his crimes without explicit punishment and granting him an unconditional exemption. “This has been a very terrible experience,” the president-elect began in his speaking turn, according to the audio broadcast by CNN. He has insisted that his conviction was unjust and that “legal experts” consider it so.
“I am totally innocent. “I didn’t do anything wrong,” he said in a rambling tirade in which he attacked his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, a prosecution witness in the case. “They accused me of calling a legal expense a legal expense,” he said. “It is a shame for New York,” he added in his slightly more than five-minute speech. “It has been a political witch hunt. It was done to damage my reputation so that I would lose the elections and obviously that did not work,” he defiantly stated.
“I got the most votes by far of any Republican candidate in history. And I won in the seven decisive states,” he said, going from his defense to the Los Angeles fire, wars, inflation problems “and all the horrible things that are happening.”
He has baselessly tried to hold the Department of Justice (which has not intervened in this case) and President Joe Biden responsible for his conviction. “But in the meantime, I won the elections and by a large majority,” he said. “Nothing like this has ever happened in our country. “I just want to explain that I have been treated very, very unfairly,” he concluded.
After listening to the parties, Judge Juan Merchan, in charge of the case, has reasoned his ruling. “Never before has such a unique and remarkable set of circumstances been presented to this court,” he admitted. However, he has pointed out as a paradox, “once the courtroom doors were closed, the trial itself was no more special, unique or extraordinary” than any other. What was presented as extraordinary, he reasoned, was the imposition of the sentence, given that Trump is the president-elect.
“To be clear, the protections granted by the office or the president are not a mitigating factor. They do not reduce the gravity, the seriousness of the crime, nor do they justify its commission in any way. The protections are, however, a legal mandate that, under the rule of law, this court must respect,” he argued. Merchan has stressed that among these protections is not that of “annulling the verdict of a jury” on the “ordinary citizen Donald Trump.” But since voters have elected Trump president, that influences the sentence.
“Unconditional exemption”
“It is through that lens and that reality that this court must determine a legal sentence after careful analysis,” he said before delivering his verdict. “This court has determined that the only legal sentence that allows the execution of the conviction without encroaching on the highest office in the land is an unconditional waiver that the New York State Legislature has determined to be a legal and permissible sentence for the crime of falsifying business records in the first degree. Therefore, at this time, I impose that sentence on all 34 counts. Sir, I wish you good luck in your second term,” he said when delivering his historic sentence.
The video conference was disconnected moments later. Trump is a criminal, although the ruling is appealable and the president-elect aspires to erase that stigma in the higher courts, including the Supreme Court. In a message on Truth, his social network, he anticipated that he would appeal and described this Friday’s hearing as a “despicable farce.” “Now that it is over, we will appeal this baseless deception and restore Americans’ confidence in our once great justice system,” he wrote.
A popular jury found him guilty in May of last year of those 34 crimes during a trial lasting several weeks before the same Manhattan court where the hearing was held this Friday. Trump was the first former president to sit in the dock. He went to court reluctantly, although he took advantage of that case – and the other three in which he was accused – to present himself as a martyr of unjust persecution (“a witch hunt,” in his words). He declined to testify, despite having assured that he would do so, and thus avoided exposing himself to the prosecutors’ questions.
After the jury’s ruling, Trump successfully got the judge to postpone the sentence until after the elections on November 5. And, after defeating Kamala Harris at the polls, he tried at all costs to avoid the shameful stigma of arriving at the White House with a criminal record in just 10 days. His last desperate maneuver was an appeal to the Supreme Court in which he asked that the sentence be postponed until the judges examined whether the presidential immunity that those same magistrates had recognized to the presidents for the acts carried out had been violated in the case. in the exercise of his position.
The maneuver failed. In a brief resolution, the judges on Thursday night refused to provisionally suspend the hearing. Among other reasons, they based their refusal on the fact that the judge had already anticipated that the unconditional exemption was the most likely sentence and that Trump could attend the hearing by videoconference. In addition, they indicated that their allegations could be studied when analyzing the merits of the case. The Supreme Court was divided: two conservative judges joined the three progressive judges in rejecting Trump’s request, while the other four (conservatives) were in favor of agreeing to the suspension.
Falsifying business records is punishable by up to four years in prison, although the sentences for each of the crimes can be served simultaneously. In cases like Trump’s – without taking into account either his past or his presidential future – it is likely that the convicted person will have to go to prison. In this case, in addition, his character as president-elect weighed, although in theory nothing in the United States Constitution prevents a president from being one from prison.
