U.S. President Donald Trump (L) introduces 7th U.S. Circuit Court Judge Amy Coney Barrett as his nominee to the Supreme Court in the Rose Garden at the White House September 26, 2020 in Washington, DC (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images).
The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday rejected Donald Trump’s eleventh-hour request to halt Friday’s sentencing hearing in the president-elect’s criminal hush-money case out of New York.The 5-4 ruling against the 45th and future-47th president was less than one page.
“The application for stay presented to Justice Sotomayor and by her referred to the Court is denied for, inter alia, the following reasons,” the order reads. “First, the alleged evidentiary violations at President-Elect Trump’s state-court trial can be addressed in the ordinary course on appeal. Second, the burden that sentencing will impose on the President-Elect’s responsibilities is relatively insubstantial in light of the trial court’s stated intent to impose a sentence of ‘unconditional discharge’ after a brief virtual hearing.”
Eschewing a typical opinion, the terse ruling goes on to note that Justice Clarence Thomas, Justice Samuel Alito, Justice Neil Gorsuch, and Justice Brett Kavanaugh would have granted the application.
In sum, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett sided with the justices appointed by Democratic Party presidents.
Trump on Wednesday filed an application asking the justices to step in and stop Acting New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan from formally sentencing him in the case where Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts for payments made to keep his alleged affair with adult film star Stormy Daniels quiet.
In his 51-page application seeking emergency intervention, Trump claimed that Merchan was wrong in refusing to vacate his convictions and dismiss the case against him after he won the 2024 presidential election.
Trump’s controversial argument asserts the novel theory that the immunity from prosecution granted to a sitting president via last year’s landmark Supreme Court ruling extends into the transition period following an election.
“President Trump noted that, upon his inauguration as the 47th President of the United States on January 20, 2025, he will be completely immune from all criminal process, state or federal,” Trump’s attorney, D. John Sauer, wrote in the filing. “President Trump also stated that the doctrine of sitting-President immunity shields him from criminal process during the brief but crucial period of Presidential transition, while he engages in the extraordinarily demanding task of preparing to assume the Executive power of the United States.”
Merchan earlier this week rejected Trump’s theory of president-elect immunity. The state’s intermediate appellate court and highest court both followed suit, refusing to halt Trump’s sentencing hearing.
Prosecutors with the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office pushed back hard on Trump’s immunity claim, imploring the court not to intervene on Trump’s behalf Thursday morning.
The filing from the DA’s office asserted that the “extraordinary” relief Trump is requesting has never before been sought and would set a dangerous precedent for the court by creating a new form of “President-elect immunity” from whole cloth.
“[D]efendant makes the unprecedented claim that the temporary presidential immunity he will possess in the future fully immunizes him now, weeks before he even takes the oath of office, from all state-court criminal process,” the filing stated. “This extraordinary immunity claim is unsupported by any decision from any court. It is axiomatic that there is only one President at a time. Non-employees of the government do not exercise any official function that would be impaired by the conclusion of a criminal case against a private citizen for private conduct. And as this Court has repeatedly recognized, presidential immunity is strictly limited to the time of the President’s term in office.”
Bragg further argued that recognizing Trump’s immunity claim would conflict with the high court’s own precedent as set forth in last year’s landmark case granting a president absolute immunity from prosecution for official acts.
“No judicial decision or guidance from the Department of Justice has ever recognized that the unique temporary immunity of the sitting President extends to the President-elect,” the filing stated. “Such an extension would conflict with this Court’s holdings that Article II vests the entirety of the executive power in the incumbent President alone and that only the incumbent is charged with performance of the executive duty under the Constitution.”
If the justices are not eager to further expand presidential prosecutorial immunity, Trump also claimed that his filing of the appeal should have triggered an immediate and automatic stay of trial court proceedings.
“The commencement of President Trump’s interlocutory appeal raising claims of Presidential immunity causes an automatic stay of proceedings in the trial court under Trump v. United States and related case law,” his attorneys wrote. “This appeal will ultimately result in the dismissal of the District Attorney’s politically motivated prosecution that was flawed from the very beginning, centered around the wrongful actions and false claims of a disgraced, disbarred serial-liar former attorney, violated President Trump’s due process rights, and had no merit.”
The DA’s office argued that the federal court did not have the legal authority to intervene in state criminal court proceedings at such an early stage in the process.
“As a threshold matter, this Court lacks jurisdiction over a state court’s management of an ongoing criminal trial when defendant has not exhausted his state-law remedies and there has been no ‘[f]inal judgment[ ] or decree[ ] rendered by’ the New York Court of Appeals, or even the state trial court,” the filing states.
Despite the Supreme Court refusing his petition, Trump is is unlikely to substantially affected. Merchan earlier this week already signaled that he will let the president-elect off the hook with no meaningful legal consequences, even allowing Trump to appear remotely due to the rigors of the presidential transition period.
“While this Court as a matter of law must not make any determination on sentencing prior to giving the parties and Defendant an opportunity to be heard, it seems proper at this juncture to make known the Court’s inclination to not impose any sentence of incarceration, a sentence authorized by the conviction but one the People concede they no longer view as a practicable recommendation,” the judge wrote.
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