Trump hush-money judge to rule on whether to throw out conviction

The judge in Donald Trump's New York criminal case is expected to decide Tuesday whether the US President-elect will face sentencing, or escape punishment despite being convicted by a jury.

Trump was convicted of 34 felony counts in May after a jury found he had fraudulently manipulated business records to cover up an alleged sexual encounter with a porn star ahead of the 2016 election.

Prosecutors argued that concealing the alleged tryst was intended to help him win his first run for the White House.

Trump, who had been scheduled to be sentenced on November 26, may receive a reprieve if Judge Juan Merchan decides to dismiss the case following the Supreme Court's recent ruling on presidential immunity.

That landmark ruling saw the court, with a 6-3 conservative majority, decide that US presidents have sweeping immunity from prosecution for a range of official acts committed while in office.

Ahead of the election, Trump's lawyers moved to have the case thrown out in light of the Supreme Court decision, a move which prosecutors have firmly rejected.

If Merchan throws out the case on that basis, there will be no sentencing of Trump, 78.

If he does not, Trump's legal team would almost certainly seek to oppose or delay any sentencing, insisting it would interfere with Trump's role as commander-in-chief once he is sworn in on January 20.

"The stay and dismissal (of the case) are necessary to avoid unconstitutional impediments to President Trump's ability to govern," one of Trump's lawyers, Emil Bove, wrote to the court last week.

Bove pointed to Special Counsel Jack Smith's move to vacate deadlines in a 2020 election interference case, delaying it indefinitely -- but not yet dropping it outright.

 'Unprecedented circumstances'  

Smith's move in the federal case is in line with long-standing Department of Justice policy not to prosecute sitting US presidents.

The Manhattan prosecutor acknowledged in correspondence with the court that "these are unprecedented circumstances" and called for the competing interests of the jury's verdict and Trump's election to be balanced.

On Tuesday, the prosecution said it was open to a further delay to sentencing while the court considered Trump's effort to dismiss the case outright.

Merchan had been due on November 12 to rule on the next steps in the case but pushed that back a week to allow for all sides to state their positions at the request of prosecutors.

Thomas Goldstein, the publisher of SCOTUSblog, a leading legal site, wrote in a New York Times editorial the Manhattan prosecution "seems to be driven by politics and hatred of Mr. Trump. That reinforces why (it) must be dismissed."

Trump's former attorney general Bill Barr said that both the New York case as well as others around the country had been "plainly brought for political purposes (and) have now been extensively aired and rejected in the court of public opinion."

"Further maneuvering on these cases in the weeks ahead would serve no legitimate purpose and only distract the country and the incoming administration from the task at hand," he wrote.

Trump has repeatedly derided the hush money case as a witch hunt, saying it "should be rightfully terminated."

  'Avoid accountability' 
 Alongside the New York case, brought by state-level prosecutors, Trump faces two active federal cases: one related to his effort to overturn the 2020 election and the other connected to classified documents he allegedly mishandled after leaving office.

However, as president, he would be able to intervene to end those cases, and Smith, the special counsel handling both cases, has reportedly begun to wind them down.

A Trump-appointed federal judge had already thrown out the documents case, but Smith had sought to appeal that decision.

"One of the many troubling things about Trump's reelection is that he will largely avoid accountability in his four criminal cases," said former prosecutor Randall Eliason.

He called for sentencing to proceed, but for the judge to fashion a sentence that would not interfere with Trump's duties as commander-in-chief.