Judge sentences Trump to unconditional discharge, making him first US president to be a felon

It is both a very lenient and a very serious sentence. A New York judge on Friday sentenced Donald Trump on 34 felony counts of falsifying invoices, checks and accounting records in order to conceal payments of $130,000 to the porn actress Stormy Daniels so that she would remain silent and not harm his chances in the 2016 presidential election. As expected, the sentence was an unconditional discharge: there is no prison, no probation, not even a fine. At the same time, it certifies his crimes. In a way, the judge condemns Trump to be the first criminal president of the USA.

The president-elect appeared by video conference at the hearing, where the prosecutors in the case agreed to grant him unconditional discharge. “This has been a very terrible experience,” said the president-elect in his turn to speak. He insisted that his conviction was unfair and that “the legal experts” consider it so. “I am totally innocent,” he said in a long tirade in which he attacked his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, a prosecution witness in the case. “I think it’s been a tremendous setback for New York and the New York court system,” he added in his five-minute speech, claiming that it was done to damage his reputation so that he would lose the election “and obviously that did not work,” he said defiantly.

He repeated the arguments he had made the day before on his network, Truth Social. “This was nothing other than Weaponization of our Justice System against a Political Opponent. It’s called Lawfare, and nothing like this has ever happened in the United States of America, and it should never be allowed to happen again,” he wrote.

After hearing the parties, Judge Juan Merchan, in charge of the case, gave his reasons for his ruling. He acknowledged that it was an exceptional case, but he assured that he had treated it just like any other case. He then issued his historic sentence. It is an appealable decision and the president-elect hopes to erase that stigma in the higher courts, including the Supreme Court.

A jury found him guilty of those 34 felonies in May of last year during a trial that lasted 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 of crimes, to present himself as a martyr of an 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.

Following the jury’s decision, Trump successfully got the judge to postpone sentencing until after the November 5 election. And, after beating Kamala Harris at the polls, he tried at all costs to avoid the embarrassing stigma of arriving at the White House with a criminal record. His last desperate maneuver was an appeal to the Supreme Court in which he asked that sentencing be postponed until the judges examined whether the case had violated the presidential immunity that those same judges had granted to presidents for acts carried out in the exercise of their office.

The maneuver failed. In a brief resolution, the judges refused to suspend the hearing on Thursday night. Among other reasons, they based their refusal on the fact that the judge had already anticipated that an unconditional discharge was the most likely sentence and that Trump could attend the hearing by videoconference. In addition, they indicated that his arguments 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 granting 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, the likely outcome would be for the convicted person to have to go to prison. In this case, his status as president-elect also weighed in, although in theory nothing in the U.S. Constitution prevents a president from performing his duties from prison.

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