The Biden donor judge overseeing Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s criminal prosecution and a New York jury’s coached conviction of former President Donald Trump this week delayed Trump’s sentencing hearing until after the 2024 election.
Judge Juan Merchan, the acting justice of the New York State Supreme Court, announced Friday that he will postpone his decision on how long Trump should be jailed until November 26, exactly three weeks after Election Day 2024. Trump faces up to 136 years in prison after a jury found him guilty of 34 counts of bookkeeping fraud.
Bragg initially indicted Trump on claims that he violated the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) when his former attorney Michael Cohen paid pornographic actress Stormy Daniels to keep quiet about an alleged affair.
Nondisclosure deals like Trump’s are perfectly legal and don’t meet the threshold for criminal charges beyond a misdemeanor. Bragg, who campaigned on vengeance against the Republican, however, ignored the FEC and Department of Justice’s decision not to charge Trump over the payment and pursued a felony prosecution.
Several notably anti-Trump legal experts and media mouthpieces warned that Bragg’s case was weak and reeked of partisanship. Merchan only furthered those suspicions by entertaining Bragg’s demands to gag Trump.
Merchan originally planned to sentence Trump less than one week before the Republican National Convention in July. He then moved the hearing to September 18. Merchan’s latest ruling makes clear that the new and impending date is also moot.
Merchan, whose “rabid pro-Democrat bias” plagued how he presided over the Trump case, claims he indulged Trump lawyers’ requests to push back the sentencing because “the Court is a fair, impartial and apolitical institution.”
“The imposition of sentence will be adjourned to avoid any appearance – however unwarranted – that the proceeding has been affected by or seeks to affect the approaching Presidential election in which the Defendant is a candidate,” the judge wrote.
The electoral and financial momentum Trump found through his various convictions and his survived assassination attempt in July, however, could have been the motivation the hyperpartisan judge needed to do everything he could to further keep Trump from becoming a political martyr.
Washington D.C. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who recently laughed off the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity ruling, also admitted this week that the criminal trial weighing Special Counsel Jack Smith’s January 6 indictment of Trump is unlikely to come for “months.”
Polls show Democrat use of legal indictments to attack their political opponent ahead of the presidential faceoff in November have backfired tremendously.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on X @jordanboydtx.
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