Originally published at: Manhattan Prosecutors Agree To Delay Trump’s Sentencing Following Immunity Ruling - TPM – Talking Points Memo
Prosecutors from the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office agreed on Tuesday with a request from former President Donald Trump to postpone his criminal sentencing. Trump’s lawyers requested Monday that the judge can entertain arguments that the Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity might have bearing on his conviction. Sentencing is scheduled for Thursday, July 11, 2024.…
No appeal can be made until a sentence is rendered … correct?
So process goes in to limbo - ?
Still convicted of FELONIES - and sentencing pending …
GOP will nominate a convicted Felon - unless Trump can somehow get Federal judge to bulldoze into the whole process on an “emergency” basis & invoke Federal supremacy over state jurisdiction - and justify overriding conventional process - for “imperial President” reasons
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Sentencing is a formality. To apply the current ruling I think would be ex post facto.
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Speaking of Crime, Paul Krugman recently wrote an informative article.
Schedules being what they are, this column was written before the first Biden-Trump debate. So if you’re looking for savvy takes on the effectiveness of various strategies and tactics, you’re in the wrong place.
It seems safe to predict, however, that Donald Trump — a felon who has been found civilly liable for sexual abuse and defamation — will try to make a good bit of the debate about crime. It also seems safe to predict that almost everything he says about crime (and other subjects, like the economy) will be deeply misleading, if not outright lies, despite the prospect of real-time and post hoc fact-checking.
After all, Trump and his allies have spent months falsely portraying America as a nation terrorized by a wave of violent crime, pointing the finger at migrants and claiming that President Biden is responsible.
Here’s what actually happened: We experienced a substantial rise in homicides in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic, when Trump was in the White House. After Biden took his place, the homicide rate first plateaued, then began a steep decline that seems to be continuing. Murders, in particular, dropped rapidly in 2023 and seem to have plunged further this year. It seems quite likely that the homicide rate in 2024 will turn out to be lower than it was in any year of the Trump presidency.
Or to put it another way, if you want to play this by MAGA rules, under which the president is held responsible for national crime rates on his watch, then you’d have to say that Biden ended the Trump crime wave.
Prominent Trump supporters are, of course, insisting that the good news on crime is fake. But while there is some room for debate in defining what constitutes a violent crime, a murder is a murder, which is why I focus on homicide numbers. And national crime data is assembled from reports by many police departments; are they all involved in a deep-state conspiracy?
The truth is that the recent history of crime in America is a highly encouraging story. The social disruption caused by the pandemic caused a temporary jump in violent crime, but our society quickly regained its equilibrium, and our cities are probably as safe as they have ever been.
Still, you may say, never mind facts, which have a well-known liberal bias. What about feelings? Aren’t Americans living in constant fear of crime?
No, they aren’t. People may tell pollsters that they believe crime is getting worse; they almost always do (crime plunged between the early 1990s and the mid-2010s, yet a majority of Americans consistently said it was rising). But if you look at how people behave, they act as if they’re feeling pretty safe these days.
To see what I mean, consider an example of someone well known who claims to be feeling terrified. The other day, in a segment about border security, Maria Bartiromo, a Fox News host, declared, “I don’t walk anywhere anymore in New York City.” Maybe that’s really how she feels, in which case I feel sorry for her and all the experiences she’s missing. Contrary to what many people apparently believe, New York is not, in fact, an urban hellscape; I walk around the city all the time — including in neighborhoods that are home to large immigrant communities — and it’s a fairly cheerful place these days, whose sidewalks are full of other people doing the same.
But don’t take my word for it. Cell phone data lets researchers track foot traffic in urban downtowns. As of last year, weekday traffic was still well below prepandemic levels, presumably reflecting fewer people commuting into downtown offices given the rise in remote and hybrid work. But weekend foot traffic, driven by people choosing to take advantage of urban amenities, had almost fully recovered — which wouldn’t be happening if shoppers, tourists and so on were terrified of crime. In fact, around this time last year, weekend foot traffic in Midtown Manhattan, where Fox News has its headquarters, was higher than it was before the pandemic.
Trump might not concoct his own crime stats, but my guess is that in this campaign, he’ll never concede that violent crime has come way down, and he’ll continue to focus on a few widely publicized stories, examples of terrible crimes committed by migrants.
Responding to such stories is delicate; nobody wants to minimize the horror of even one violent crime, whoever commits it. But if we’re going to smear whole groups of people for crimes committed by a few members of those groups, where do we stop? For what it’s worth, a new study by the right-leaning Cato Institute finds that in Texas, undocumented immigrants are less likely to be convicted of murder than the native-born. (It’s even less likely for legal immigrants.)
The important thing to remember is that the decline in the violent crime rate is in fact a huge Biden-era success story. And the president probably deserves some credit for that success — among other things, the American Rescue Plan included a lot of aid to state and local governments, which may have encouraged additional spending on law enforcement. But no matter how you cut it, crime should be considered one of Biden’s strengths, not a weak point.
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It’s obvious to me that because tRump signed the checks to Cohen while sitting in the Oval they were official acts.
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Fuck. That’s all I got.
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Merchan will look at the evidence presented that was gathered while Trump was president. So, signing checks in the White House will be one of those. Then, he will need to apply the new test (i.e. bullshit made up cover for Trump) to see what is an official act of a president. Signing a check for his business, even if it wasn’t to cover up payment to a porn star, can never be seen as an official act. It’s not related to a presidential duty, it has nothing to do with the powers of the presidency, so it has to be an unofficial act. Apply this to everything else, and I suspect Merchan to make quick work of pretty much everything that was presented at the trial, since very little having to do with Trump as president was presented.
The Trump team will appeal, but they shouldn’t get any traction in NY courts, it’s just a slam dunk that this stuff was personal business and in no way official. You can bet they try to take it to the SC, and that’s where things get murky of course…if the SC really goes down the road that anything a president does between inauguration and leaving office is an official act, then they truly have decided to make Trump our dictator/king. Are they willing to go that far? We’ll just have to wait and see…the one good thing is this appeal will come next year, so if Trump loses they likely won’t grant him immunity for this, and then hope in 2028 the new white hope of the Republican party can win and become leader of our new Christian theocracy.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Merchan deals with this in a week and gives Trump his sentence by the end of the month, and the state courts may not stop him from finishing the sentencing phase while they deal with the appeals. I would expect that all to be sorted out by the election, it’s enough time if they make it a priority. So, hopefully that means we’ll still get a Trump sentence before the election, but this is all new so we’ll have to wait and see how that works out.
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How is signing checks from your personal business an official act of the president exactly?
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Wherever there has been no accountability and no justice system, countries have thrived.
Oh wait - no, totally opposite - why do Republicans think that all will be well. Even vast wealth can’t shield you from polluted air and once the scales have well and truly tipped, then even Zuckerberg’s wall and ammunition stock can only slay some thousands before the hoards pour into his little Xanadu.
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I’m not sure but I’m pretty sure this SC can figure it out.
ETA. In Josh’s blog there is some speculation that Roberts inserted a poison pill that will, at a minimum, hamper state prosecution. It is probably most likely it will eliminate state prosecution.
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Trump used the same signature as on all official documents, therefore it’s an “official act.” ALSO, was signed in his official office.
::rolling eyes but wouldn’t be surprised::
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The hits just keep coming. Wasn’t he just a candidate for office when all that stuff happened?
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My question is what is the immunity for people acting under the Presidents orders or authority?
For example:
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They can still be charged. But Trump could also pardon them if president.
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This asshole is going to get away with everything.
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I wish I could share your optimism, but I think Trump’s lawyers will win big here. The ruling yesterday seems crafted specifically to allow the SCOTUS to define almost anything as having at least ‘presumptive immunity’. In every case where they acknowledged something might be a private act, they came up with a twisted hypothetical that puts it back under the “official” umbrella. I agree that his signing checks is so far out of the clear scope of presidential duty that even this court may be unable to justify letting him off on that basis. However, they don’t have to do that to give him a literal get out of jail free card, because of the presumption of immunity.
It’s a bogus argument, but I can see Trump’s lawyers pushing the following.
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Any evidence related to discussions Trump had with what he claims were ‘presidential advisors’ (and he’ll say that everyone involved with the case was) is out of bounds.
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Since court consideration of motivation for official acts is disallowed, all evidence and jury instruction related to Trump’s state of mind when he wrote the checks is also disallowed.
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It’s irrelevant whether the discussions or motivations were related to official acts, adjacent to official, or private. Trump is entitled to presumptive immunity. The court was obligated to hold hearings where the prosecution had to prove beyond any reasonable doubt that they were private acts. They didn’t, so the entire case must be thrown out.
Merchan will rightly call BS on all three arguments, but it hardly matters. Trump will immediately appeal to the federal courts, throwing the entire case into extended limbo. Even on an expedited basis, it wouldn’t get to the SCOTUS before fall. Would this court take that case if it got there? Of the sinister six, only Barrett seems the least bit squeamish about putting their thumb on the scale for Trump, so I think it’s 100% that they agree to hear it and that they don’t schedule arguments until after the election. If Trump wins the election, it’s 100% that they order a new trial that cannot take place while he’s in office. If Trump loses, they’ll be in the mode of limiting the power of a Democratic president, so they’ll side with Merchan.
When you add in that Thomas gave Cannon carte blanche to declare Smith’s appointment as special counsel unconstitutional, which will put that case on next years SCOTUS schedule, Trump’s victory yesterday was total. He goes free on everything.
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I see no need for a sentencing delay or for considering in any way Roberts explicit attempt to delegitimize the rules of evidence in effect at the time of Trump’s trial.
The Constitution states quite clearly that ex-post-facto laws are prohibited. Surely that applies equally to SCOTUS rulings as well, if they do indeed have the force of law. They certainly change the existing law. Trump was tried in a New York court legally under legal evidentiary rules; SCOTUS cannot wave its One Ring and declare that part of that past has now become illegal, not just now and moving forward, but also back then; it can only make such evidentiary rules illegal if used again in the future.
The matter gets a bit stickier for indictments that have not yet come to trial, but a reasonable person would say that those legal processes must continue under the rules in effect when they began. Of course, SCOTUS is not reasonable; it is nakedly partisan and utterly corrupted.
I can only remind the readers that SCOTUS has no means of enforcing its diktats, and that some of them have indeed been ignored in the past. This Opinion should be ignored by the sovereign state of New York, especially in this case with Roberts deliberately interfering in a state’s legal procedure.
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Many are criticizing Manhattan court allowing for briefing on the impact of yesterday’s immunity decision. I disagree. A short delay in sentencing Trump in Manhattan to allow for briefing on the impact, if any, of the immunity decision is a good idea. Let’s hear Trump’s arguments that somehow he’s immune to prosecution in NY state for an act prior to the election. Moreover, since it all related to campaigning and is way outside of the outer perimeters of presidential authority (the silly new Roberts 6 test), the taking of arguments makes the inevitable Trump appeal harder to win.
It’s not a guarantee, of course, since a corrupt Supreme Court could do what it wants, but that’s the case no matter what. At least this short delay would, I hope, eliminate one grounds for appeal — that Trump couldn’t even argue on the impact of the immunity decision.
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