New York (WBEN/AP) - President-elect Donald Trump was sentenced Friday in his hush money case, but the judge declined to impose any punishment, an outcome that cements his conviction, while freeing him to return to the White House unencumbered by the threat of a jail term or a fine.
The punishment-free judgement marks a quiet end to an extraordinary case that for the first time put a former president and major presidential candidate in a courtroom as a criminal defendant. The case was the only one of four criminal indictments that has gone to trial, and possibly the only one that ever will.
Manhattan Judge Juan Merchan could have sentenced the 78-year-old Republican to up to four years in prison. Instead, he chose a sentence that sidestepped thorny constitutional issues by effectively ending the case, but assured that Trump will become the first person convicted of a felony to assume the presidency.
"There's no other requirements that the President-elect has to do if it's an unconditional discharge," said former Erie County District Attorney John Flynn in an interview with WBEN.
Typically a conditional discharge is for a certain period of time, according the Flynn, and in that time period, one of the conditions from a judge is often don't get in trouble or rearrested. And if the individual gets rearrested or in trouble, then the court can circle back and resentence.
With an unconditional discharge, there is no condition to "not get in trouble" or not get rearrested.
Flynn feels in this case, the judge made the correct decision.
"Putting conditions on the President of the United States in 10 days is just not practical," Flynn said. "Obviously going to anger management or going to some type of counseling classes is just not applicable in this unique situation."
Flynn adds the results in a case like this don't happen very often.
"In all my time as DA in almost eight years, I never saw a judge give an unconditional discharge. Even before that, when I was on the bench as a judge, I never gave out an unconditional discharge," Flynn said. "There's always conditions on a discharge, but obviously this is a unique situation."
Unlike his trial last year, when Trump brought allies to the courthouse and addressed waiting reporters outside the courthouse, the former president did not appear in person Friday, instead making a brief virtual appearance from his home in Palm Beach, Florida.
Trump, wearing a dark suit and seated next to one of his lawyers with an American flag in the background, appeared on a video screen as he again insisted he did not commit a crime.
“It’s been a political witch hunt. It was done to damage my reputation so that I would lose the election, and obviously, that didn’t work,” Trump said.
Trump called the case “a weaponization of government” and “an embarrassment to New York.”
Trump’s sentence of an unconditional discharge caps a norm-smashing case that saw the former and future president charged with 34 felonies, put on trial for almost two months and convicted by a jury on every count. Yet, the legal detour — and sordid details aired in court of a plot to bury affair allegations — didn’t hurt him with voters, who elected him to a second term.
Merchan said that like when facing any other defendant, he must consider any aggravating factors before imposing a sentence, but the legal protection that Trump will have as president “is a factor that overrides all others.”
“Despite the extraordinary breadth of those legal protections, one power they do not provide is that they do not erase a jury verdict," Merchan said.
Trump, briefly addressing the court by video, said his criminal trial and conviction have “been a very terrible experience” and insisted he committed no crime.
Before Friday's hearing, Merchan had indicated he planned the no-penalty sentence, called an unconditional discharge, which meant no jail time, no probation and no fines would be imposed.
Prosecutors said Friday they supported a no-penalty sentence, but they chided Trump's attacks on the legal system throughout and after the case.
“The once and future President of the United States has engaged in a coordinated campaign to undermine its legitimacy,” prosecutor Joshua Steinglass said.
Rather than show remorse, Trump has “bred disdain” for the jury verdict and the criminal justice system, Steinglass said, and his calls for retaliation against those involved in the case, including calling for the judge to be disbarred, "has caused enduring damage to public perception of the criminal justice system and has put officers of the court in harm’s way.”
The hush money case accused Trump of fudging his business' records to veil a $130,000 payoff to porn actor 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 says nothing sexual happened between them, and he contends that his political adversaries spun up a bogus prosecution to try to damage 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.
Bragg's office said in a court filing Monday that Trump committed “serious offenses that caused extensive harm to the sanctity of the electoral process and to the integrity of New York’s financial marketplace.”
While the specific charges were about checks and ledgers, the underlying accusations were seamy and deeply entangled with Trump’s political rise. Prosecutors said Daniels was paid off — through Trump's personal attorney at the time, Michael Cohen — as part of a wider effort to keep voters from hearing about Trump's alleged extramarital escapades.
Trump denies the alleged encounters occurred. His lawyers said he wanted to squelch the stories to protect his family, not his campaign. And while prosecutors said Cohen's reimbursements for paying Daniels were deceptively logged as legal expenses, Trump says that's simply what they were.
“There was nothing else it could have been called,” he wrote on Truth Social last week, adding, “I was hiding nothing.”
Trump was a private citizen and presidential candidate when Daniels was paid in 2016. He was president when the reimbursements to Cohen were made and recorded the following year.