President-elect Donald Trump faces sentencing Friday for his New York hush money conviction after the nation’s highest court refused to intervene.
Here’s the latest:
Four big TV screens are mounted on the walls: one on either side of the bench where the judge will sit and one each hanging from the left and right side, parallel with the tables where the defense and prosecution will sit.
Another large monitor sits behind next to the defense table, visible to the judge’s bench. A crew from ABC News, which will be distributing an audio recording of the proceeding after it ends, was testing the microphone system. At one point, instead of the usual counting up or down to check levels, one member of the crew started reciting the first few words of the Declaration of Independence — “When in the Course of human events” — drawing chuckles from the crowd of reporters and spectators in the gallery.
Although Trump was in court for every day of the trial, the judge said the president-elect could attend the sentencing via video if he chose. He’s expected to do that, and it’s not a first in the case.
He appeared remotely for a pretrial hearing in May 2023.
On May 30, 2024, Trump became the first former American president to be convicted of felony crimes.
Trump sat stone-faced while the verdict was read as cheering from the street below could be heard in the hallway on the courthouse’s 15th floor where the decision was revealed after more than nine hours of deliberations.
▶ Read more from inside the courtroom that day.
Trump’s trial stretched over seven weeks, with 22 witnesses testifying, including porn actor Stormy Daniels, Trump’s fixer turned foe Michael Cohen, former supermarket tabloid publisher David Pecker and White House insiders.
Prosecutors called 20 witnesses. The defense called just two. Trump decided not to testify on his own behalf. Here’s a look back at what some of the key witnesses had to say.
Trump was convicted last May of 34 counts of falsifying business records, making him the first former American president to be convicted of felony crimes.
The jury found that he falsified records kept by his company to hide the purpose of reimbursements to his then-lawyer Michael Cohen, who had made a $130,000 payment to porn actor Stormy Daniels during Trump’s 2016 campaign to silence her claim of an extramarital sexual encounter. Trump denies they had sex.
The hush money case was the only one of Trump’s four criminal indictments to go to trial.
Since his Nov. 5 election, special counsel Jack Smith ended his two federal cases. One pertained to Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss; the other alleged he hoarded classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate.
A separate, state-level election interference case in Georgia is in limbo after an appeals court removed prosecutor Fani Willis from the case.
No. New York state trial-level courts rarely, if ever, livestream their proceedings. Appeals courts sometimes do.
Judge Juan M. Merchan has presided over Manhattan felony cases since 2009, after three years in family court. Before that, he was a Manhattan prosecutor and a lawyer for New York state.
Trump has pointed to factors including Merchan’s total of $35 in 2020 donations to Democrats – including President Joe Biden – to argue that the judge is biased and should step away from the case.
A state court ethics panel opined in 2023 that Merchan could continue handling the case, and he avowed that he could be fair and impartial. Read more about Merchan, who also oversees Manhattan’s Mental Health Court.
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