Judge cites Trump’s return to White House as rationale for unconditional discharge sentence
Victoria Bekiempis
Judge Juan Merchan laid out his rationale for imposing the sentence of unconditional discharge on the president-elect.
“The protections afforded the office of the president are not a mitigating factor. They do not reduce the seriousness of the crime or justify its commission in any way,” the judge said.
“The protections are, however, a legal mandate which, pursuant to the rule of law, this court must respect and follow. However, despite the extraordinary breadth of those protections, one power they do not provide is the power to erase a jury verdict.”
He then handed down his sentence, noting that it is influenced by Trump’s recent presidential election victory:
It was the citizenry of this nation that recently decided that once again you should have the benefits of those protections which include, among other things, the supremacy clause and presidential immunity. It is through that lens and that reality that this court must determine a lawful sentence.
This court has determined that the only lawful sentence that permits entry of judgment of conviction, without encroaching on the highest office of the land is unconditional discharge.
Therefore, at this time, I impose that sentence to cover all 34 counts.
Merchan concluded with: “Sir, I wish you godspeed as you assume your second term in office.”
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Updated at 14.18 EST
Key events
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The Guardian’s Victoria Bekiempis was in the courtroom when Donald Trump was sentenced, and reports that it was a more muted affair than one would expect – in part because the president-elect was not there:
Donald Trump’s felony sentencing Friday morning had many of the trappings of his prior appearances at Manhattan supreme court. Queues of bleary-eyed reporters. Clusters of amped-up court officers. Whispers of worrisome internet service among concerned journalists.
What Trump’s hush money sentencing did not have: Trump in person.
When the judge, Juan Merchan, issued his 3 January decision upholding the jury’s verdict on the once-and-future US president, he scheduled Trump’s sentencing for 10 January and he gave Trump an opportunity to attend virtually, if he so chose.
Trump took him up on that offer – despite having used the courthouse as a campaign stop and platform for airing his many grievances throughout his trial.
Trump’s absence was felt. When the courthouse doors opened just before 8am ET, attendees only had to pass through one set of metal detectors, rather than one downstairs and one upstairs. Those with state courts-specific press credentials didn’t have to walk through any magnetometers at all.
With Trump gone, security was getting back to normal.
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Listen as Trump protests at sentencing, and judge explains penalty
Audio has been released of Donald Trump’s brief sentencing hearing in New York, in which judge Juan Merchan cited his looming inauguration to hand down a sentence that includes no real penalties for the president-elect’s conviction on 34 felony business fraud charges.
Here’s Trump defending his conduct:
And Merchan explaining the rationale for his sentence:
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Joanna Walters
President-elect Donald Trump won’t be involved in the day-to-day management of the family business empire, the Trump Organization, once he takes office, the Wall Street Journal reported today, citing an ethics plan from the company.
William Burck at the law firm Quinn Emanuel will assist in developing internal ethics policies and procedures to avoid any perceived conflicts, the report said, citing the Trump Organization, Reuters writes.
Trump Organization won’t enter into new contracts with foreign governments during Trump’s presidency, the report said.
The Trump Organization did not immediately respond to a request from the news agency for comment.
The WSJ report added that the Trump Organization will also voluntarily donate to the U.S. Treasury profits it identifies as coming from foreign government officials at its hotels and businesses.
Once he takes office on January 20, his investments will be independently managed by outside institutions, the WSJ report went on, adding that Trump would also have “limited access” to Trump Organization’s financial information.
Trump and his sons Don Jr and Eric were last year ordered to pay over $350m plus pre-judgment interest by a New York judge who found them guilty of intentionally committing financial fraud over the course of a decade while in control of the Trump Organization, in a civil case led by the office of the New York attorney general Letitia James.
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Updated at 14.18 EST
Joanna Walters
Donald Trump’s company is in negotiations to repurchase the lease on a hotel in Washington, DC it used to own, the Wall Street Journal reported today, citing people familiar with the matter.
The Trump Organization had sold the lease on the hotel, which is blocks away from the White House in the historic Old Post Office Building, for $375 million in 2022. The hotel was leased to the Trumps in 2013 by the federal government, which owns the building, Reuters reports.
Eric Trump, executive vice president at the company and Trump’s son, discussed purchasing the lease with merchant bank BDT & MSD Partners – which controls the long-term lease on the hotel, the report said.
Talks are still in the preliminary stages and may not lead to a sale of the property’s lease, the report added. The hotel currently operates under a brand owned by Hilton Worldwide.
During Trump’s first term, Democrats had criticized the lease as a conflict of interest, after which his son, Donald Trump Jr, took the reins at the hotel.
The Trump Organization, Hilton and BDT & MSD Partners did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Guardian and others previously reported how the hotel during Trump 1.0 became a golden egg for the family as those seeking influence and face time with the-then president dropped loadsa money at the place with its see-and-be-seen lobby and bar for power players and wannabes.
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Updated at 14.18 EST
Oliver Milman
As Donald Trump prepares to take office as a president who has called the global climate crisis a hoax and a scam, leading US government experts in climate science report, without any equivocation today, that 2024 was the hottest year ever recorded for the world’s lands and oceans.
Their report provides yet another measure of how the climate crisis is pushing humanity into temperatures we have previously never experienced. Here in the US right now, record wildfires are raging out of control around Los Angeles amid the kind of prolonged droughts, rising temperatures and disrupted patterns that are unprecedented.
Last year was the hottest in global temperature records stretching back to 1850, the federal agency the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) announced, with the worldwide average 1.46C (2.6F) warmer than the era prior to humans burning huge volumes of planet-heating fossil fuels.
The data supports separate figures released by European Union scientists this week that also show a record 2024, albeit those figures showed 2024 was 1.6C (2.8F) hotter than pre-industrial times, the first measure beyond the internationally-agreed threshold of keeping long-term temperatures below a 1.5C (2.7F) rise.
While a single year above 1.5C does not void the Paris climate agreement target to help protect the most vulnerable countries from worsening heatwaves, droughts, storms and other impacts, scientists have said the goal is effectively “deader than a doornail” and will be surpassed in the longer term within a decade. Trump pulled the US out of the Paris agreement in his first term and Joe Biden re-joined asap in his administration.
Follow our wildfires live blog here.
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Updated at 14.18 EST
The day so far
New York judge Juan Merchan sentenced Donald Trump in his hush money case to unconditional discharge, which means the incoming president will serve no jail time and pay no fines after being convicted on 34 felony business fraud charges. Despite the leniency, Trump blasted the prosecution as a “despicable charade”, and proclaimed his innocence, while Republican lawmakers, including senator Lindsey Graham and House speaker Mike Johnson, rallied to his defense. Trump now has few unfinished pieces of legal business standing between him and inauguration on 20 January, but there remains the question of whether the justice department will be able to release special counsel Jack Smith’s report into his aborted prosecution of the president-elect for allegedly trying to overturn his 2020 election defeat. A federal appeals court ruling yesterday offered some hope that it could come out, but obstacles remain.
Here’s what else has happened today so far:
Merchan said Trump’s re-election was a major factor in his decision to let him escape any meaningful penalties after his convictions.
Trump supporters and opponents gathered outside the Manhattan criminal court during the president-elect’s sentencing, at which he appeared virtually.
The supreme court heard arguments over a law that could lead to TikTok being banned in the United States after 19 January. Follow our live blog for more.
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From the Guardian’s Victoria Bekiempis and Joan E Greve, here’s the full report on Donald Trump’s sentencing today in the New York hush money case – the only one of his four criminal indictments to reach a jury verdict before his return to the White House:
Donald Trump will avoid jail time for his felony conviction in the New York hush-money case, a judge determined on Friday, marking both a dramatic and anti-climactic development in the historic criminal proceedings weeks before he returns to the White House.
The judge who presided over Trump’s criminal trial, Juan Merchan, issued a sentence of “unconditional discharge”, meaning the president-elect will be released without fine, imprisonment or probation supervision for his conviction on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. While the sentence makes Trump a convicted felon, he will face no penalty other than this legal designation.
Trump, whose presidential inauguration is scheduled for 20 January, is the first US president – former or sitting – to face a criminal trial, let alone a guilty verdict and subsequent sentencing.
Addressing the court via video shortly before receiving his sentence, Trump called the case “a very terrible experience”, an “injustice” and a “political witch-hunt”.
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Republican House speaker Johnson signals effort to restore ‘the American people’s trust in our system of justice’ after Trump sentencing
Mike Johnson, the Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, assailed Donald Trump’s prosecution on business fraud charges as “a politically motivated and contrived witch hunt” in a statement released after his sentencing today.
The Trump ally also signaled he would support unspecified efforts aimed at “restoring the American people’s trust in our system of justice”. The president-elect’s appointees for key cabinet positions have been critical of efforts to prosecute Trump for various offenses, including the hush money payment that a jury determined ran afoul of New York’s state fraud laws.
Here’s more, from Johnson’s statement:
This entire case against President Trump has been a politically motivated and contrived witch hunt aimed solely at preventing him from returning to the White House. It was never about the facts, and it should have never been brought in the first place. The judge grossly perverted the American legal system by manipulating existing law in a purely partisan effort to convert a bogus misdemeanor charge into a felony. Judge Merchan and the deranged prosecution have done untold damage to our justice system.
But despite this liberal judge’s tireless efforts and obvious media campaign to smear President Trump, the only jury that matters – the American people – saw through this corruption of justice, spoke decisively, and rejected their weaponization of government.
After four years of lawfare, restoring the American people’s trust in our system of justice will be critically important, and I support President Trump’s decision to appeal this decision and put this shameful chapter in American history behind us.
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Trump plans to separate himself from family business once he takes office – report
Once he is inaugurated as president, Donald Trump plans to separate himself from his Trump Organization family business, under a set of soon-to-be-released ethics rules, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Ethics groups and Democratic lawmakers have warned of the potential for Trump to enrich his businesses through decisions made in his capacity as US president. Here’s more about the new rules, from the Journal:
President-elect Donald Trump won’t be involved in the day-to-day management of the Trump Organization once he takes office and the company won’t enter into new contracts with foreign governments during his presidency, according to an ethics plan set to be released by the company on Friday.
Prominent lawyer William Burck will assist in developing internal ethics politics and procedures to avoid any perceived conflicts, the company said. “The Trump Organization is dedicated to not just meeting but vastly exceeding its legal and ethical obligations during my father’s presidency,” Eric Trump, the president-elect’s son and the Trump Organization’s executive vice president, said in a statement.
Among other measures, the company said it would voluntarily donate to the U.S. Treasury profits it receives from foreign government officials the company can identify at its hotels and other businesses. The plan states that the president-elect’s investments will be independently managed by outside institutions that will “neither solicit nor accept input” from him.
Trump will also have “limited access” to the company’s financial information. The Trump Organization said it would limit information “to only reflect general business updates of the company as a whole and not an accounting of the performance of any specific business or asset.”
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Here are sketches from inside the courtroom as judge Juan Merchan sentenced Donald Trump today:
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