President-elect Donald Trump is sentenced on Jan. 10 in his business records case, 10 days before his inauguration.
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Trump Given an Unconditional Discharge
Judge Juan Merchan said he’ll give President-elect Trump an unconditional discharge. This means that no penalty is issued other than a conviction being entered on Trump’s legal record.
The sentencing formalizes Trump’s felony conviction.
Trump is expected to appeal the conviction.
Judge Merchan Speaks From the Bench
After President-elect Donald Trump defended his innocence, Judge Juan Merchan began speaking from the bench.
Merchan said a judge must consider a case’s facts and any mitigating or aggravating circumstances.
“Never before has this court been presented with such a unique and remarkable set of circumstances,” he said.
Trump Speaks in Court
After President-elect Donald Trump’s lawyer, Todd Blanche, rebutted the prosecution, Trump spoke virtually via Teams.
“This has been a very terrible experience. I think it has been a tremendous setback for New York and the New York court system,” Trump said.
The president-elect called the case a “political witch hunt.”
“It was done to damage my reputation so that I would lose the election, and obviously, that didn’t work,” he added.
Trump suggested that voters witnessed what happened in the courtroom and threw their support behind him because they thought it was a “disgrace.”
“I’m totally innocent. I did nothing wrong,” he said.
Trump Faces Sentencing in New York Business Records Case
New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan has already indicated that he won’t give Trump any prison time or monetary punishment.
In a Jan. 3 order, Merchan said his inclination is not to impose any sentence of incarceration and that given concerns about presidential immunity, “an unconditional discharge appears to be the most viable solution.” Merchan also offered Trump the opportunity to appear virtually rather than in person.
With an unconditional discharge, Merchan isn’t expected to impose any meaningful punishment but rather will likely enter a judgment of conviction and offer a statement condemning Trump’s actions.
“He’s going to take an opportunity to try to give Trump a tongue lashing, to try to make him look bad,” Heritage Foundation Vice President John Malcolm told The Epoch Times. Malcolm, who directs the foundation’s Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, said Merchan may accuse Trump of disrespecting the rule of law but ultimately not impose any sentence because Trump is about to take office.
The sentencing comes after a nearly two-year legal battle that started with Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg indicting Trump in April 2023. More than a year later, in May 2024, a jury found Trump guilty on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in relation to alleged payments to adult film actress Stephanie Clifford, also known as Stormy Daniels.
As the case played out, Merchan imposed multiple gag orders on Trump, held him in contempt 10 times, and threatened jail time. Merchan accused Trump on Jan. 3 of having disdain for the judiciary.
Merchan’s comments were made as he rejected the idea that Trump’s character should serve as a basis for throwing out the jury verdict.
“Defendant’s disdain for the Third Branch of government, whether state or federal, in New York or elsewhere, is a matter of public record,” he said. “Indeed, Defendant has gone to great lengths to broadcast on social media and other forums his lack of respect for judges, juries, grand juries, and the justice system as a whole.”
Trump has denied wrongdoing and derided the case as illegitimate.
Just before sentencing, he filed multiple appeals in order to stave off the sentencing date and challenge the legitimacy of the case.
On Jan. 7, a New York appeals court denied Trump’s request to halt sentencing and the next day, the president-elect to ask for the U.S. Supreme Court’s intervention.
He filed his application for a stay to Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who requested a response from Bragg’s office by 10 a.m. on Jan. 9. Later the same day, the court rejected Trump’s request to stop the sentencing.
Trump has asked it to consider whether he is entitled to an automatic stay, as well as whether Merchan’s admission of certain evidence violated the doctrine of presidential immunity. Another question that he proposed was whether presidential immunity extended to presidents-elect, which Merchan had rejected on Jan. 3.
Merchan had also rejected Trump’s arguments that the Supreme Court’s ruling in Trump v. United States, which established that presidents enjoy certain levels of immunity from criminal prosecution, undermined Bragg’s case.
Merchan said in a Dec. 16, 2024, opinion that Trump had waited too long to file objections to Bragg’s use of certain evidence, while the evidence that he contested surrounded conduct that was unofficial and therefore unprotected by the doctrine of presidential immunity.
In a post on Truth Social on Dec. 17, 2024, Trump criticized Merchan’s decisions on the presidential immunity arguments. Merchan had “completely disrespected the United States Supreme Court, and its Historic Decision on Immunity,” he said.
The president-elect said the opinion written by Merchan “goes against our Constitution, and, if allowed to stand, would be the end of the Presidency as we know it.”
Regardless of whether he is sentenced, Trump could later seek to overturn the conviction based on presidential immunity or other factors. Trump has told multiple courts that he is entitled to an automatic stay because of the nature of presidential immunity, but Merchan and the New York Appellate Division, First Judicial Department, disagreed, rejecting his appeals.
The New York state business records case is one of two remaining criminal cases against Trump, as two others, brought by special counsel Jack Smith, have been dismissed. After Trump’s electoral victory in November 2024, Smith filed to dismiss the Washington election interference case and an appeal related to the Florida classified documents case, while citing a long-standing Department of Justice assertion that prosecution of sitting presidents violates the Constitution.
Trump’s other remaining criminal case in Georgia was left on shaky ground last month when an appeals court held that the lead prosecutor, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, should be disqualified. It’s unclear how that case will play out, and legal experts doubt that a state prosecution can continue without violating the supremacy clause of the U.S. Constitution.
Epoch Times reporters Sam Dorman, Jackson Richman and Jacob Burg contributed to this report.
