SOURCE :- THE AGE NEWS
President-elect Donald Trump was fully sentenced on Friday in his quiet income situation, but the judge declined to implement any abuse.
The result cements Trump’s faith, freeing him from the burden of a sentence or good and allowing him to return to the White House.
Trump’s absolute discharge sentence comes at the end of a norm-smashing situation that saw the original and former president be charged with 34 felonies, tried for about two months, and found guilty on every count. However, the constitutional trip and the vile facts that were revealed in court during a plot to conceal event claims didn’t hurt him with citizens who elected him to a second word.
The 78-year-old Republican may have received a maximum sentence of up to four years in jail, according to Manhattan Judge Juan M. Merchan. Instead, he chose a word that avoided contentious constitutional issues by successfully bringing the case to an end, guaranteeing that Trump would become the first US president to be found guilty of a crime.
On January 20, the national opening takes place in Washington.
Trump argued that his legal trial and conviction were” a very bad experience” and that he had no violence because he appeared to be almost sentenced.
” It’s been a political witch hunt. It was done to harm my standing so that I would lose the election, and certainly, that didn’t work”, Trump said.
Trump called the event” a weaponization of authorities” and” an shame to New York,” while seated in a black suit and accompanied by a lawyer at his side on a movie screen in the courtroom.
Prosecutors criticized Trump’s attacks on the legal structure throughout the trial and after the trial, saying they were in favor of a no-penalty statement.
According to counsel Joshua Steinglass, the once and potential president of the United States has engaged in a planned campaign to undermine its legitimacy.
Trump has “bred scorn” for the jury verdict and the criminal justice system, according to Steinglass, and his calling for reprisal against those involved in the case, including calling for the judge to be fired, “has caused enduring harm to the common perception of the criminal justice system and has put soldiers of the jury in harm’s manner.”
The former president was seated with his attorney Todd Blanche as he made his appearance from his Florida home as he stepped forward to become the second-highest ranking Justice Department official in the incoming administration.
” Legally, this case should not have been brought”, Blanche said, reiterating Trump’s intention to appeal the verdict.
Before the hearing, a handful of Trump supporters and critics gathered outside. One group held a banner that read,” Trump is guilty”. The other held one that said,” Stop partisan conspiracy” and” Stop political witch hunt”.
The hush money case claimed that Trump had falsified the records of his business to conceal a$ US130, 000 payoff to pornstar Stormy Daniels. She was paid, late in Trump’s 2016 campaign, not to tell the public about a sexual encounter she maintains the two had a decade earlier. He claims that there wasn’t any sexual activity between them, and that his political adversaries conspired to launch a false accusation against him in an effort to harm him.
” I never falsified business records. It is a fake, made up charge”, the Republican president-elect wrote on his Truth Social platform last week. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, whose office brought the charges, is a Democrat.
In a court filing on Monday, Bragg’s office claimed that Trump “gravely harmed the integrity of New York’s financial system and the sanctity of the electoral process.”
Although the specific allegations were about checks and ledgers, the truth was deeply tied to Trump’s rise in politics. As part of a wider campaign to prevent voters from learning about Trump’s alleged extramarital affairs, Daniels was allegedly paid off through Michael Cohen, Trump’s personal attorney at the time.
Trump denies the alleged encounters occurred. His attorneys claimed that he wanted to silence the allegations in order to protect his family, not his campaign. Trump claims that Cohen’s payments to Daniels were actually defrauded as legal expenses, but that is exactly what they were.
Trump’s lawyers tried unsuccessfully to forestall a trial. Since his May conviction on 34 counts of falsifying business records, they have used almost every legal tool to try to get the conviction overturned, the case dismissed, or at least the sentencing postponed.
The Trump attorneys have heavily relied on claims of presidential immunity from prosecution, and a Supreme Court decision that granted former commanders-in-chief considerable immunity helped them gain traction in July.
When Daniels was paid in 2016, Trump was a private citizen and candidate for president. When Cohen’s reimbursements were made and recorded the following year, he served as president.
On the one hand, Trump’s defense argued that immunity should have prevented jurors from hearing certain information, such as testimony from his exchanges with Hope Hicks, the then-White House communications director.
And after Trump won the election this past November, his attorneys argued that the case had to be dropped to prevent an impact on his upcoming presidency and his transition to the Oval Office.
Merchan, a Democrat, repeatedly postponed the sentencing, initially set for July. But last week, he set Friday’s date, citing a need for “finality”. He wrote that he strove to balance Trump’s need to govern, the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling, the respect due a jury verdict and the public’s expectation that” no one is above the law”.
Trump’s lawyers then launched a flurry of last-minute efforts to block the sentencing. A 5 to 4 Supreme Court decision on Thursday night, which denied the defendants ‘ last hope, put an end to their hope.
AP
