The US Justice Department has decided on Friday to postpone until after the presidential elections, scheduled for November 5, the sentence against former president and Republican candidate for the White House Donald Trump, who was found guilty at the end of May of falsifying business records to try to hide the payment of $130,000 to the former porn actress ‘Stormy Daniels’ in exchange for her silence.
Judge Juan Merchan, of the Supreme Court of the State of New York, has explained that the sentence will be read on November 26 and has thus endorsed the request of Trump’s legal team, which had requested to postpone the date again, set for the second time for September 18.
Thus, he has emphasized that the measure has been motivated, mainly, by the electoral process, with a view to maintaining the objectivity of the American judicial system. “The postponement of the sentence (…) should dispel any idea that the court was seeking with its decision to offer an advantage or a disadvantage to any of the candidates or political parties,” he said.
In addition to delaying the sentence until November 26, Merchan has clarified that he plans to resolve Trump’s appeal, which seeks to annul the verdict issued in May by a jury based on the Supreme Court’s ruling on his partial immunity as a former president. Merchan himself has considered this verdict, precisely, something “historic.”
Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung has pointed out that “there should be no sentence in the witch hunt carried out by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office.” “As the Supreme Court has stipulated, this case, along with other tricks by the Harris-Biden tandem, must be rejected,” he said, according to information from the American television network CNN.
The decision to postpone sentencing is another victory for the New York tycoon, who thus manages to delay the resolution of yet another criminal case against him, as he has already done with the others.
The case of the classified documents found at his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida was dismissed in July, and two other cases related to the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, are not expected to move forward until after the elections.
