Donald Trump is appealing Judge Juan Merchan’s two rulings that dismissed his attempts to toss his conviction in the hush money case, and the president-elect is seeking a stay of Friday’s scheduled sentencing.
Trump’s appeal comes on the same day that he will be certified as the winner of the 2024 presidential election – and four years since he tried to overturn his election loss and his supporters rioted at the US Capitol.
Jeremy Stahl and I wrote on Friday:
If Trump asks, there’s a good chance that an appeals court, and maybe even the United States Supreme Court, will delay the sentencing, effectively until after his presidency. To begin with, Merchan had months and months to decide to sentence Trump. By waiting until the last minute, he’s putting all the courts in a bind. There is one week until sentencing, and less than three weeks until Trump is back in office again. There’s hardly time to brief and decide this case. An appeals court may decide that Merchan dallied and give Trump the benefit of the doubt.
Further, while Trump’s arguments for president-elect immunity and his other legal arguments appear weak at first glance, they are not frivolous, and the stakes are high given that Trump is about to assume the presidency. A court will want to consider these arguments. We know that when the Supreme Court considered Trump immunity in the election interference case, it saw the case as involving much larger issues than just Donald Trump, and it took its time to issue a decision (a delay that ultimately allowed Trump to run out the clock on these and other charges). Any appeals court that wants to consider these issues seriously will need more than literally the few days that now would appear.
Finally, there are serious legal issues related to the underlying New York prosecution itself. It could well be that on the merits, the case will be reversed, perhaps because it improperly bootstrapped federal campaign finance law onto a state business records case. If Trump is sentenced, his appeal might be stayed or it could take years. In the meantime, the sentence will hang over Trump. A conservative Supreme Court skeptical of the merits of Trump’s prosecution and protective of the presidency might step in and save Trump once again from criminal proceedings coming to a close.