Donald Trump’s plea to pause his upcoming sentencing in the Stormy Daniels hush money case has been denied.
Judge Juan Merchan ruled last week that Trump, 78, will be sentenced in the case in New York on Friday, just 10 days before his inauguration.
Earlier Monday, Trump’s attorneys made a last-ditch request to put the sentencing on ice while they ask an appeals court to throw out his ruling.
But Merchan denied that plea, setting up a spectacle in New York court on Friday.
The president-elect has the choice to appear virtually or in-person, but he isn’t one to miss a media feeding frenzy.
Trump regularly tears into the embattled judge, whom he openly despises and has accused of having blatantly anti-MAGA political motivations.
In a dramatic filing last week, Merchan denied Trump’s motion to dismiss the case and throw out the guilty verdict against him entirely.
Trump’s team has argued that the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity decision applies to this case and should be tossed.
Merchan also revealed that he is unlikely to jail Trump, who had been potentially facing up to four years behind bars.
The president-elect lashed out about the ‘Witch Hunt’ of a case on his Truth Social platform on Sunday calling it ‘nothing but a Rigged Charade.’
He then referred to ‘Acting’ Justice Merchan as ‘a radical partisan’ and called the sentencing decree ‘knowingly unlawful’ and ‘against our Constitution.’
‘If allowed to stand, [it] would be the end of the Presidency as we know it,’ Trump added.
He said that ‘Merchan has so little respect for the Constitution that he is keeping in place an illegal gag order on me, your President and President Elect, just so I cannot expose his and his family’s disqualifying and illegal conflicts.’
Trump was furious about not being ‘allowed to defend myself,’ calling it a violation of his First Amendment rights.
In May, a jury found Trump guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records to hide a $130,000 payment to a porn star – Stormy Daniels – to keep her quiet ahead of the 2016 presidential election about their alleged affair 18 years earlier.
In dramatic court testimony, Daniels went into salacious and lurid detail about the night she claimed to have spent with Trump during a charity golf tournament in Nevada. He has denied the encounter took place.
Lawyers for Trump argue the case should now be thrown out so it does not get in the way of his ability to govern once he takes the oath of office on January 20, 2025.
They also claim the case should be thrown out due to the Supreme Court’s July ruling that the President of the United States has immunity from prosecution for official acts in office.
The case centered on Special Counsel Jack Smith’s prosecution of Trump for allegedly masterminding efforts to overthrow the 2020 election while in office, including on January 6 in the Capitol riot.
In Trump’s second motion to dismiss the case filed since his May conviction, his defense lawyers argued that having the case hang over him during his presidency would impede his ability to govern.
Trump’s first motion – which argued the case ran afoul of the Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity – was unsuccessful.
Merchan determined last month that the evidence presented at the trial earlier this year was related ‘entirely to unofficial conduct’ and therefore did not amount to official actions as president.
‘This Court concludes that if error occurred regarding the introduction of the challenged evidence, such error was harmless in light of the overwhelming evidence of guilt,’ Merchan wrote.
‘Even if this Court did find that the disputed evidence constitutes official acts under the auspices of the Trump decision, which it does not, Defendant’s motion is still denied as introduction of the disputed evidence constitutes harmless error and no mode of proceedings error has taken place.’
Trump lashed out in a post on Truth Social in December calling it a ‘completely illegal, psychotic order’ by the ‘corrupt and biased’ judge.
Prosecutors asked a New York judge last week to spare Trump prison time for his hush-money conviction in an effort to prevent the case from being thrown out altogether.