Donald Trump will soon know his sentence in the Stormy Daniels affair. He exhausted all his appeals to avoid this sentence, going all the way to the Supreme Court, without success.
Donald Trump will be inaugurated as President of the United States on January 20. He will thus become the first to sit in the Oval Office with a criminal conviction. After being found guilty last May, by a jury of twelve unanimous citizens, in the Stormy Daniels affair, he will receive his sentence this Friday, January 10. The former president allegedly paid a bribe of $130,000 to the porn star in exchange for his silence about an adulterous relationship which allegedly took place in 2016, before the presidential campaign opposing him to Hillary Clinton.
However, Donald Trump did everything to avoid this sanction, by postponing the sentencing as much as possible and playing on his status as elected president. Indeed, the President of the United States enjoying immunity, the pronouncement of the sentence would have been superfluous. In one week, Donald Trump and his lawyers tried four times to block the conviction. They went so far as to file an appeal before the Supreme Court, the highest court in the United States. The Republican’s team also had every reason to believe that this appeal would work since among the nine judges who make up this Court, six are conservative, including three appointed by Donald Trump, as recalled Release. However, he lost by a vote of five to four. Conservative judges who voted for sentencing justified themselves by assuring that the next president could appeal or use his immunity, reports The Parisian.
A symbolic sentence
In addition, the future 47th President of the United States does not risk a prison sentence under any circumstances. Judge Juan Merchan, who will have to pronounce the sentence more than seven months after the declaration of Donald Trump’s guilt, himself indicated that a prison sentence was “impossible to implement”. The sentence handed down will therefore be mainly symbolic. Donald Trump does not even have to come in person to Manhattan Criminal Court. He will be able to appear by video at the hearing scheduled for 9:30 a.m. (2:30 p.m. in Paris).
A “witch hunt”?
You should know that Donald Trump has also risked prosecution in several other cases. He then presented himself as the victim of a “witch hunt” by his political opponents. A speech that worked among its supporters, but which is based on nothing. Indeed, he escaped any legal consequences in three other cases in which he had been charged, the most serious of which was the illegal attempt to reverse the results of the 2020 presidential election. This had also led to the ‘assault on the Capitolon January 6, 2021. Donald Trump was not out of the woods until November 5, 2024, when he was re-elected to the White House. Special prosecutor Jack Smith then dropped the charges even though the trial had not yet begun.