U.S. President-elect Donald Trump appears remotely before New York State Judge Joan Murchin in New York Criminal Court in Manhattan on January 10, 2025, for his sentencing in a criminal case in which he is accused of paying hush money in 2024. I was sentenced. To a porn star Photo credit: AP

President-elect Donald Trump was formally sentenced Friday (Jan. 10, 2025) in his hush money case, but the judge declined to impose a sentence. The verdict reinforces Mr. Trump’s conviction, freeing him to return to the White House without the threat of jail time or fines.

Mr. Trump’s conditional discharge is a groundbreaking case in which the former and future president was charged with 34 felonies, tried for nearly two months and convicted on every count.

Even so, the legal hoopla – and the sordid details aired in court of a plot to bury the affair allegations – didn’t endear him to voters, who elected him to a second term.

Manhattan Judge Joan M. Murchin could have sentenced the 78-year-old Republican to up to four years in prison. Instead, he opted for a sentence that sidesteps thorny constitutional issues by effectively ending the case but ensuring that Trump will be the first indicted to take the presidency.

The hush money case accused Mr Trump of falsifying his business records to cover up a $130,000 payment to porn star Stormy Daniels. She was paid, late in Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign, not to tell the public about a sexual encounter she says took place between the two a decade ago. He maintains that nothing sexual happened between them, and claims that his political opponents staged a bogus lawsuit to try to harm him.

“I have never falsified business records. This is a false, fabricated accusation,” 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.

Mr Bragg’s office said in a court filing on Monday (Jan 6, 2025) that Mr Trump “committed serious crimes that caused widespread damage to the sanctity of the electoral process and the integrity of New York’s financial markets.”

While the specific allegations were about checks and ledgers, the underlying allegations were rampant and deeply intertwined with Mr. Trump’s political rise. Prosecutors said the payments were made to Daniels — at the time by Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen — as part of a broader effort to keep voters from hearing about Mr. Trump’s alleged extramarital escapades.

Mr. Trump denied the alleged encounters. His lawyers said he wanted to end the stories to protect his family, not his campaign. And while prosecutors said Cohen’s fees to pay Daniels were fraudulently applied as legal expenses, Mr. Trump says they were just that.

“There was nothing more that could be said,” he wrote on Truth Social last week, “I wasn’t hiding anything.”

Mr Trump’s lawyers tried unsuccessfully to block the trial. Convicted of falsifying 34 business records since May, they have pulled virtually every legal avenue to try to overturn, dismiss or at least postpone the conviction. has taken

He has argued before various federal courts, including Merchin, New York appellate judges, and the Supreme Court. Trump’s lawyers have leaned heavily on claims of presidential immunity from prosecution, bolstered by a Supreme Court ruling in July that grants substantial immunity to the former commander-in-chief.

Mr. Trump was a private citizen and presidential candidate when Daniels was paid in 2016. He was president when the payments were made to Cohen and records were kept the following year.

On the one hand, Mr. Trump’s defense argued that immunity should have prevented jurors from hearing some evidence, such as testimony about his conversations with then-White House communications director Hope Hicks.

And after Mr. Trump won the election last November, his lawyers argued that the case had to be dropped to avoid affecting his future presidency and his transition to the Oval Office.

Murchin, a Democrat, has repeatedly postponed the sentencing, initially set for July. But last week, it set the date for Friday (January 10, 2025), citing a “final” requirement. He wrote that he tried to balance Mr. Trump’s need to govern, Supreme Court immunity decisions, respect for jury verdicts and the public’s expectation that “no one is above the law.”

Mr. Trump’s lawyers then launched a last-minute effort to block the conviction. Their last hope ended Thursday night (January 9, 2025) with a 5-4 decision by the Supreme Court that refused to delay the sentence.

Meanwhile, other criminal cases that once loomed over Mr. Trump have been dropped or halted before trial.

After Mr. Trump’s election, special counsel Jack Smith shut down federal prosecutors over Mr. Trump’s handling of classified documents and efforts to overturn his defeat of Democrat Joe Biden in the 2020 election. Georgia’s statewide election meddling case remains in limbo after prosecutor Fannie Willis was fired.