New York state judge lets Trump’s conviction in hush money case stand
New York (The Uttam Hindu): The state judge in the hush money case against President-Elect Donald Trump has let his conviction stand, rejecting his argument that a Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity applied to the case. Judge Juan Merchan’s ruling casts the shadow of a criminal conviction over Trump as he prepares to assume the presidency next month.
The judge said that the Supreme Court ruling applied only to his official actions and not to his personal conduct. The judge, however, had earlier agreed to indefinitely postpone the sentencing in the case Trump was convicted of falsifying business records because the hush money payments to a porn star were shown as legal expenses. The payments had been made through his lawyer at the time to get the porn star to remain silent about her claims of a tryst with him and each of the cheques were shown as separate offences giving the impression that Trump had been convicted of 34 crimes.
The case was brought by a local prosecutor, who under the New York system was elected on a Democratic Party ticket. Trump has another petition pending in the hush money case, asking it to be thrown out because it would hamper his functioning as President. Two federal cases against Trump have been dismissed by judges at the request of the Special Prosecutor following his election as President. One of the cases was about election interference because of his alleged role in the events leading to the January 6, 2021 riots by his supporters who crashed into the Capitol while Congress was in the process of certifying Joe Biden’s election as President.
Trump has promised to pardon the scores of people who have been convicted of participation in the riots or have cases pending. The other case charging him with mishandling classified documents when he left office at the end of his first term was dismissed by the judge in July on procedural grounds. Another local election interference in Georgia is tangled up in allegations of misconduct by the prosecutor who hired her ex-boyfriend to help prosecute it.
Trump scored a victory last weekend when ABC News and its star anchor George Stephanopoulos agreed to settle a defamation suit he brought against them for having said that he had raped a woman. The two agreed to publish their “regret” for making the allegation and to pay $15 million to settle the case which will go to a foundation for setting up Trump’s presidential library, rather than to the pockets of billionaire Trump. Saying at a news conference on Monday, “We have to straighten out the press”, Trump threatened to go after the media that he said misreport or those who encourage them.
One of his targets, he said, was the Des Moines Register in the swing state of Iowa which published an election-eve poll that he was losing there. But he won the state by a 13 per cent margin. Trump called the erroneous report election interference and said he would sue it. He also criticised the Columbia University-based Pulitzer Prize Board, which awards the top US journalism prizes. He has a libel case pending against the Pulitzer Board for a prize it gave The New York Times and The Washington Post for their reports claiming there were ties between Russia and his campaign during the 2016 election. After a two-year enquiry, Special Counsel Robert Mueller debunked the allegations of Russian interference in elections, but the Pulitzer Board affirmed its award to the newspapers.
