Unlock the White House Watch newsletter for free
Your guide to what the 2024 US election means for Washington and the world
Donald Trump’s “hush money” case has been paused while a Manhattan judge considers the “unprecedented circumstances” of his election as US president while awaiting sentencing that had been set for later this month.
Justice Juan Merchan was due to decide on Tuesday whether Trump’s conviction in state court should be thrown out in light of the Supreme Court’s decision to grant presidents broad immunity for official acts. If the case survived, Trump was to be sentenced on November 26.
But in an email to lawyers, which was made public on Tuesday, Merchan agreed to give both parties until November 19 to brief him on why the case should be paused, perhaps until Trump leaves office.
The New York case was the only one of the four criminal indictments brought against Trump after he left the White House to go to trial.
In May, he was convicted on 34 counts of falsifying business records in connection with what prosecutors described as a scheme to pay off a porn actor to conceal an alleged affair with Trump.
But it was always unclear whether he would ultimately face prison time when sentenced — and that uncertainty deepened after last week’s election returned him to the presidency.
In a message to Merchan on Sunday, Trump’s lawyer Emil Bove cited the Department of Justice’s decision to wind down two separate federal prosecutions of the president-elect — over his alleged attempts to overturn the 2020 election and the retention of classified documents — and suggested New York prosecutors should do the same.
The office of Manhattan’s district attorney, which brought the hush money case, acknowledged the “impact on this proceeding from the results of the presidential election” including Trump’s inauguration in January.
In their email to Merchan, New York prosecutors said they agreed “that these are unprecedented circumstances” and that the arguments raised by Trump’s lawyers “require careful consideration” to ensure that decisions in the case “appropriately balance the competing interests” of sentencing a defendant and allowing the US president to perform his duties.
Bove went further, arguing in a response to prosecutors that a dismissal of the entire case was “necessary to avoid unconstitutional impediments to President Trump’s ability to govern”.
Should Merchan agree to throw out the New York case, Trump will probably have successfully thwarted all four criminal indictments against him.
The remaining case, brought by state prosecutors in Georgia over alleged attempts to overturn the 2020 election in the state, has become bogged down in procedural issues as district attorney Fani Willis fights an attempt to disqualify her after it was discovered that she had a relationship with an outside attorney she had hired to help with the prosecution.
Trump remains embroiled in civil cases, however, and is still liable to pay more than $450mn after being found to have inflated the value of his assets in representations to banks. He was also ordered to pay more than $88mn to E Jean Carroll, a writer who claimed Trump had assaulted her in the 1990s and subsequently defamed her.
Trump is appealing against those civil judgments.