Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg (AP Photo/Frank Franklin II), Donald Trump (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)
Donald Trump’s defense lawyers immediately used the U.S. Supreme Court’s immunity decision on Monday to launch a challenge of the former president’s guilty verdicts on 34 felony counts in Manhattan — and now it seems his July 11 sentencing hearing won’t take place.
A Tuesday letter from Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s (D) office told Acting New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan that the prosecution won’t oppose a sentencing delay to give themselves more time to rebut Trump’s arguments and, by extension, give the judge more time to consider the issue thoroughly.
“[D]efendant requested until July 10, 2024 to submit a memorandum of law in support” of a motion to set aside the verdict, prosecutors said. “While defendant’s letter states that he does ‘not object to an adjournment of the July 11, 2024 sentencing date,’ his request to file moving papers on July 10 is necessarily a request to adjourn the sentencing hearing […] pending resolution of the motion.”
Taking the position that Trump’s arguments are “without merit,” Bragg’s office nonetheless isn’t opposing a sentencing delay “pending determination of [the defendant’s] motion.”
“We respectfully request a deadline of July 24, 2024—two weeks after defendant’s requested deadline—to file and serve a response,” prosecutors concluded.
While Trump was convicted in the hush-money case of falsifying business records in order to cover up his 2006 dalliance with porn star Stormy Daniels, influencing the 2016 election while a candidate, at least one lawyer for the former president has told CNN that the Supreme Court’s bar on the use of “official acts” as evidence to charge private conduct should at most overturn the verdicts or “at the very least” result in a new trial “where those immune acts will not come into evidence[.]”
In the defense’s letter to Merchan, attorneys Todd Blanche and Emil Bove said the Supreme Court ruling confirmed that Bragg “should not have been permitted to offer evidence at trial of President Trump’s official acts” and that the “trial result cannot stand.”
“By way of background, on March 7, 2024, President Trump filed a motion in limine to preclude evidence of his official acts based on the presidential immunity doctrine. In that filing, we objected to anticipated testimony from certain potential witnesses, evidence of President Trump’s social media posts and public statements, and a 2018 filing with the Office of Government Ethics,” the letter said.
“Under Trump, this official-acts evidence should never have been put before the jury,” the defense continued. “Consistent with arguments that we made before and during the trial, the Supreme Court held in Trump that President Trump ‘may not be prosecuted for exercising his core constitutional powers, and he is entitled, at a minimum, to a presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts.””
Merchan doesn’t have to delay sentencing, but given that the neither the prosecution nor the defense opposes a delay, and given the gravity of the issues at play, it would not be a surprise if the trial judge does push back the proceedings.
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