US Supreme Court rule 5-4 against Trump for him to face justice in lower court
By Jeph Ajobaju, Chief Copy Editor
Justices on the United States Supreme Court have ruled 5-4 against Donald Trump, giving the go ahead for his sentencing scheduled for Friday in his New York hush money case for which a jury convicted him of 34 felonies in a lower court last year.
The top court dismissed Trump’s assertion that being President-elect should be factored in because a sentence could impede his functions in the White House after being sworn into office.
CNN reports that the Supreme Court rejected Trump’s emergency request to delay the lower court proceeding, setting the stage for him to be sentenced 10 days before he is inaugurated on January 20 for a second term.
Four conservative justices – Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh – said they would have granted Trump’s request. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined the court’s three liberals to side against Trump.
Judge Juan Merchan, the New York judge who oversaw Trump’s trial, had ordered sentencing in the case for Friday morning but has signaled that Trump will face neither penalties nor prison time.
The sentencing hearing is scheduled for Friday at 9:30 a.m. Trump will appear virtually, according to a person familiar with the plans, joining the proceedings from Mar-a-Lago.
In a brief, one-paragraph statement, the Supreme Court said that some of Trump’s concerns could be handled “in the ordinary course on appeal.”
The court also reasoned that the burden sentencing would impose on Trump’s responsibilities is “relatively insubstantial” in light of the trial court’s stated intent to impose no penalty.
Trump’s request at the US Supreme Court was an extraordinary appeal because the justices rarely dip into a state criminal case before all appeals in state courts are fully exhausted.
His underlying challenge to his conviction is still pending and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg argued the Supreme Court didn’t have jurisdiction to even consider the emergency request to delay the sentencing.
Trump was convicted in May last year of falsifying business records over payments to his then-lawyer Michael Cohen to reimburse a $130,000 hush money payment made to adult-film star Stormy Daniels, in order to keep her from speaking out about an alleged affair before the 2016 election. (Trump has denied the affair.)
The incoming president is fighting his conviction, saying that it should be tossed because a conservative majority of the Supreme Court in July ruled that former presidents are entitled to sweeping immunity for official actions.
Part of Trump’s argument was that his trial included evidence involving official actions from his time in office, which under the Supreme Court’s immunity decision, would ordinarily be barred from reaching a jury. Prosecutors countered that those concerns could be hashed out on appeal.
Merchan rejected that argument in December, ruling that the evidence presented by the Manhattan district attorney’s office was not related to Trump’s official conduct as president.
Trump’s attorneys told the Supreme Court that having to deal with the sentencing would distract from his transition to power and potentially jeopardize national security.
“Defending criminal litigation at all stages – especially, as here, defending a criminal sentencing – is uniquely taxing and burdensome to a criminal defendant,” Trump’s lawyers told the high court.
“President Trump is currently engaged in the most crucial and sensitive tasks of preparing to assume the executive power in less than two weeks, all of which are essential to the United States’ national security and vital interests,” they wrote.
New York prosecutors scoffed at that argument in their own filing Thursday.
“There is a compelling public interest in proceeding to sentencing,” Bragg told the Supreme Court. “Defendant has provided no record support for his claim that his duties as President-elect foreclose him from virtually attending a sentencing that will likely take no more than an hour.”
In a final filing Thursday, Trump argued that the case involved concerns of “great national importance” and that “the constitutional structure, and the nation” would be “irreparably harmed by letting the sentencing go forward.”
Alito recusal calls
The Supreme Court, meanwhile, found itself in another ethics controversy after Trump and Alito spoke by phone this week, just before Trump’s appeal was filed.
Key congressional Democrats on Thursday called for Alito to recuse himself from the sentencing case, citing the justice’s phone call with the president-elect to discuss one of his former clerks working for the incoming administration.
“Justice Alito’s decision to have a personal phone call with President Trump – who obviously has an active and deeply personal matter before the court – makes clear that he fundamentally misunderstands the basic requirements of judicial ethics or, more likely, believes himself to be above judicial ethics altogether,” said Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin.
Justices can decide for themselves whether recusal is warranted, and it is rare that they do so.
The sentencing dispute was not discussed in their conversation. Nor did the two discuss “any other matter that is pending or might in the future come before the Supreme Court or any past Supreme Court decisions involving the President-elect,” Alito said in a statement Wednesday.
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