Trump’s sentencing for secret payments to ‘Stormy Daniels’ postponed until September while judge considers presidential immunity

Trump was scheduled to be sentenced in New York on July 11 after being convicted of paying porn actress Stormy Daniels $130,000 to keep quiet about a sexual affair. The verdict, the first criminal conviction of a former president, was scheduled to come just days before the Republican Party Congress, which will take place this year in the city of Milwaukee.

On Monday, the Supreme Court ruled that the president’s immunity in office is “absolute” when he exercises his powers, in this case the right to suppress free speech or to use public authority to launch investigations. According to the judge john roberts“The nature of presidential power requires that former presidents enjoy some immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts during their tenure,” the court’s president said. “This immunity must be absolute, at least with respect to the exercise of their fundamental constitutional powers.”

This affects Trump’s cases, including a possible appeal of the New York guilty verdict. Former President has faced 81 charges Criminal offenses since he left office. The case that has reached the Supreme Court is about false allegations of fraud and the insurrection of 2021, still an attempt to overturn the result of the election in the state of Georgia, which Biden won, and also of theft. The documents were classified when he left the White House in January 2021.

The insurrection case also decides whether Trump abused his power by taking advantage of the prosecutor’s investigative power to order an inquiry into false claims of election fraud. It does not matter whether the requested inquiry was based on false allegations or had an illegal purpose, the Supreme Court said. “The President cannot be prosecuted for conduct that is within his exclusive constitutional authority,” the judges said.

There are still some flaws to judge Trump in this other case, but minimal. The option for the prosecutor’s office is to prosecute the former president for repeatedly pressuring his Vice President Mike Pence to refuse to certify the result of the 2020 elections in a special session of the Capitol on January 6, 2021. This task fell to the vice president. .because in the exercise of his office he must also preside over the Senate. The question of what and how justice is done now falls on Washington District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan.

Adjournment determines sentencing in New York case18 September at the earliestHours after the verdict was issued, Trump’s lawyers requested that Judge Marchan overturn the jury’s guilty verdict and delay sentencing to consider how the Supreme Court’s ruling might affect the case. Defense lawyers argued that Manhattan prosecutors had placed “excessive prejudicial emphasis on evidence of official acts by the president,” including Trump’s social media posts and witness testimony about meetings in the Oval Office. Prosecutors said ahead of the judge’s ruling on Tuesday that they believed those arguments had no merit, but that they would not object to delaying sentencing for two weeks while the judge considered the case.