President-elect Donald Trump on “Meet the Press” on Sunday, Dec. 8, 2024 (NBC News/YouTube).
Donald Trump’s latest attempt to stop the sentencing hearing in the criminal hush-money case has been turned down by New York’s highest court. The court’s decision to deny Trump’s request is another setback for him in a series of legal defeats this week. The president-elect has been trying to get the case dismissed and his conviction overturned.
Trump filed an emergency application on Wednesday, urging the court to put an “immediate stay” on the criminal proceedings. He was seeking to overturn Acting Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan’s rulings, which Trump claimed wrongly dismissed his arguments of Presidential immunity.
The New York Court of Appeals’ ruling means that Friday’s sentencing hearing in the hush-money case will proceed as scheduled, with Trump facing 34 felony charges. This is part of the ongoing legal battles Trump is fighting even as he transitions to the role of president-elect.
Trump’s attorney Todd Blanche wrote that he was challenging Merchan’s Dec. 16 order rejecting Trump’s claim of “presidential immunity based on evidentiary use of official acts,” as well as Merchan’s Jan. 3 order denying Trump’s motion to dismiss based on his “claim of sitting-presidential immunity as extended into the transitional period while Trump is President-elect.”
The attorney further claimed that filing the motion with the appeals court should trigger an immediate and automatic stay of proceedings at the trial court, while also using the opportunity to malign Merchan, prosecutors, and Trump’s former personal attorney Michael Cohen for their roles Trump’s convictions.
“As discussed herein, the commencement of appellate proceedings seeking interlocutory review of these claims of Presidential immunity immediately causes an automatic stay of proceedings in the Supreme Court under Trump v. United States and related case law,” the filing states. “This appellate proceeding should result in a dismissal of this politically motivated prosecution that was flawed from the very beginning, centered around the wrongful actions and false claims of a disgraced, disbarred serial-liar former attorney, violated President Trump’s due process rights, and had no merit.”
In what appears to be a novel argument for the president-elect, Trump also asserted that Merchan’s decision to schedule the sentencing hearing for Jan. 10, 2025, infringed on Trump’s constitutional rights.
“[The] Supreme Court’s unconstitutional decision to set sentencing for January 10, 2025, mere days before President Trump’s inauguration to serve a second term as President of the United States, threatens irreparable harm and deprivation of President Trump’s constitutional rights,” Blanche wrote in the filing.
Blanche made the same argument during Tuesday’s oral arguments before New York First Department Court of Appeals Associate Justice Ellen Gesmer, who pointed out that Merchan had repeatedly delayed Trump’s sentencing hearing at Trump’s own request. Gesmer quickly rejected Trump’s request to stay the proceedings.
Trump also filed an emergency application with the U.S. Supreme Court seeking to have the criminal proceedings delayed indefinitely. Prosecutors with the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office were ordered to respond to Trump’s filing by 10 a.m. on Thursday.
