The New York judge overseeing President-elect Donald Trump’s hush money trial has ordered him to appear for his long-delayed sentencing hearing on January 10, more than seven months after he was convicted on all 34 felony counts against him.
The unprecedented hearing will take place 10 days before Trump is to be sworn in as the 47th president of the United States.
He is not likely to face incarceration, however. Judge Juan Merchan wrote in his order that he agreed with prosecutors that time behind bars was no longer practical, and signalled that he may choose to impose no punishment at all.
Trump may also appear in court by video conference, if he chooses, Merchan said.
The judge’s decision will preserve Trump’s status as a felon — a first for any president.
His attorneys argued in the wake of his November victory that the case should be dismissed entirely. Prosecutors floated several options for his sentencing, which had already been delayed by a Supreme Court decision stating that presidents cannot be criminally prosecuted for official acts.
Merchan said last month that the charges against Trump did not involve any conduct relating to his duties as president.
He wrote in his order that “a sentence of an unconditional discharge appears to be the most viable solution to ensure finality and allow Defendant to pursue his appellate options.”
Unconditional discharge is a rare sentence that allows a defendant to walk free with no strings attached.
In his 18-page order, Merchan indicated that he was trying to balance the interests of justice with the Trump team’s claim that any threat of jail time would distract from his duties as president. Once Trump takes the oath of office on Jan. 20, his right to presidential immunity kicks in, meaning that even if he received jail time, it would likely have to be completed after his second term.
Trump verbally attacked the judge and prosecution team on his Truth Social platform.
“‘Acting’ Justice Merchan, who is a radical partisan, just issued another order that is knowingly unlawful, goes against our Constitution and, if allowed to stand, would be the end of the Presidency as we know it,” he wrote.
Over multiple posts that were littered with falsehoods, Trump reiterated his claim that the charges were “fake” and that President Joe Biden’s administration had been somehow involved in the state-level case.
“There has never been a President who was so evilly and illegally treated as I,” he said.
The case against Trump centered around a $130,000 payment made shortly before the 2016 election to the porn actor Stormy Daniels, who took the money by agreeing not to tell the public she and Trump had sex. At the time, Trump’s candidacy was teetering in the wake of the “Access Hollywood” tape’s release, which revealed he once made crude comments about assaulting women.
Trump denies the affair with Daniels and has maintained that he did nothing wrong.
The payment was wired by his former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, who detailed at trial how he was repaid by Trump in installments over the course of a year. Each of the charges against Trump corresponds to a New York state business record that prosecutors said had been falsified in order to cover up the hush money scheme.
Cohen said on social media that Merchan’s order seemed “both judicious and appropriate.”
Trump has said he intends to nominate two of his attorneys from the trial, Emil Bove and Todd Blanche, to positions at the Justice Department in his second administration as he seeks to surround himself with loyalists.