The US court has decided to postpone the trial of Donald Trump's criminal case, during which a decision on the sentence for the former president is to be made. The date has been moved from September 16 to November 26, i.e. after the presidential election, in which Trump will run.
Judge Juan Merchan presiding over the criminal case Donald Trump in New York explained in the justification of the decision that he decided to postpone the trial over which he was to preside in order to “avoid the appearance – however baseless – that the trial was related to the upcoming presidential election or was intended to influence it.”
Elections The US presidential election will be held on November 5, and Trump is running as a Republican.
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Not the first postponement
Merchan thus granted a motion by Trump's lawyers to postpone the trial on those grounds. The motion was not opposed by the New York prosecutor's office, which brought charges against the former president in a case related to his alleged payment for the silence of porn actress Stormy Daniels. Before the 2016 presidential campaign, he allegedly offered her $130,000 through an intermediary. in exchange for silence about their meeting, which allegedly took place a decade earlier.
This is the second time the verdict has been postponed. It was originally scheduled for July 11, then set for September 16, and now the judge has postponed the date until November 26.
An application for a complete annulment of the conviction is also pending.
Trump was found guilty in May of this year 34 felonies in connection with attempts to conceal payments and theoretically faces up to four years in prison. In practice, most experts expect the sentence to be lighter and the politician to avoid imprisonment.
Judge Merchan on Friday also postponed until November a ruling on Trump’s motion to overturn the jury’s guilty verdict. The former president requested it because of a Supreme Court ruling granting presidents partial immunity. Although Trump was not president at the time he allegedly paid Daniels $130,000 through an intermediary not to tell the press about their relationship, the trial used testimony from a political adviser, Hope Hicks, from after he became president.
“As the Supreme Court has ordered, there should be no verdict in the Manhattan prosecutors' election-interference witch hunt. This case, along with all of Harris and Biden's other scams, should be dismissed,” Trump spokesman Steven Cheung said after the court's decision.
Trump still faces two other criminal cases — in a Georgia state court and a federal court in Washington — over his attempts to overturn the results of the previous election, but they won’t be decided before the November election. And charges in another case — that the former president illegally withheld secret documents — were dismissed by Trump-nominated Judge Aileen Cannon, although prosecutors have appealed the decision.
Main image source: PAP/EPA/JUSTIN LANE