Trump Hush-Money Judge Ominously Warns a Sentence May Never Come

The judge in Donald Trump’s hush-money case on Tuesday postponed his sentencing until September 18, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to grant sweeping immunity to the former president.

“The Court’s decision will be rendered off calendar on September 6, 2024, and the matter is adjourned to September 18, 2024 at 10:00 AM for the imposition of sentence, if such is still necessary, or other proceedings,” New York State Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan wrote in a letter.

It seems that Merchan is no longer certain that Trump’s sentencing for his 34 felony count conviction will ever come to pass. The sentencing hearing was originally scheduled for July 11, just days before the Republican National Convention.

On Monday, Trump’s lawyers submitted a pre-motion letter requesting that the former president’s guilty verdict be set aside and his sentencing delayed, just hours after the ruling in Trump v. United States, which determined that Trump could not face legal action over his official conduct as president.

Although many of the actions entered into evidence in Trump’s hush-money trial took place before he won the White House, his legal team said that some of his communications with fixer Michael Cohen would have been thrown out or redacted under the new rule. Merchan had previously rejected a similar motion in April, calling it “untimely.”

Trump was convicted of falsifying business records to conceal hush-money payments Cohen had made to keep adult film actress Stormy Daniels quiet about an affair she’d had with Trump ahead of the 2016 presidential elections. Trump’s legal team hoped Monday to brief Merchan on the impact of the Supreme Court’s decision on his guilty verdict.

The next day, prosecutors for the case wrote that they did not oppose delaying the sentence.

“Although we believe defendant’s arguments to be without merit, we do not oppose his request for leave to file and his putative request to adjourn sentencing pending determination of his motion,” prosecutors wrote in a letter to Merchan.

It’s still unclear whether the results of the immunity decision will result in Trump’s trial being thrown out. Now Trump’s lawyers will have more than two months to prove that Merchan was wrong to reject their first motion on the grounds that it was untimely, that the evidence on which Trump was convicted constituted official acts as president, and that the prosecutors were wrong to use that evidence to convict him.

This story has been updated.

Concern over Joe Biden’s ability to defeat Donald Trump in November amid questions about his age and mental fitness have already reached a fever pitch across the liberal media, with columnists and editors with the campaign’s ear exhorting the president to step aside. But now members of Biden’s own party, including those at the very top, are following suit in voicing their worry after Biden’s disastrous debate performance. The latest, and most notable so far, is Nancy Pelosi.

The former speaker of the House did not give a ringing endorsement of Biden when asked by MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell Tuesday. Though she lauded the Biden administration’s achievements during his term, she also echoed fears about Biden’s condition during the debate.

“I think it’s a legitimate question to say, ‘Is this an episode or is this a condition?’” she said. “When people ask that question, it’s legitimate.”

Pelosi went on to suggest that both Biden and Trump should take mental fitness tests. “Both candidates owe whatever test you want to put them to, in terms of their mental acuity and their health—both of them,” she said.

The 84-year-old California representative is not the first elected Democrat to acknowledge the questions swirling around Biden’s candidacy, or even the loudest voice to do so—Texas Representative Lloyd Doggett called for Biden to withdraw from the race Tuesday—but she, along with South Carolina Representative James Clyburn, who was essential to Biden’s winning the Democratic nomination in 2020, is the highest-profile member of a growing chorus questioning Biden’s stamina in a race against Trump. Postdebate polls, including Democratic internal polling, show Biden behind Trump nationally, as well as in key swing states.

The Biden campaign responded to the initial swell of postdebate criticism by decrying the “bedwetting brigade.” But now, with Democratic governors holding a private phone call to express their worry, prominent party members like Pelosi and Clyburn publicly equivocating, and the urgency of messaging and energetic campaigning growing with each Supreme Court decision, it’s clear that Biden’s campaign can no longer afford to dismiss the issue.

It’s official: Representative Lloyd Doggett is the first Democratic lawmaker to call for President Joe Biden to withdraw from the 2024 presidential race, after his disastrous appearance at a CNN debate last week.

In a statement Tuesday, the Texas Democrat lauded Biden for taking over after the “wreckage” of Donald Trump’s presidency and the Covid-19 pandemic but said that “for more than a year, many Americans have indicated dissatisfaction with their choices in this election.

“President Biden has continued to run substantially behind Democratic senators in key states and in most polls has trailed Donald Trump,” Doggett said. “I had hoped that the debate would provide some momentum to change that. It did not. Instead of reassuring voters, the President failed to effectively defend his many accomplishments and expose Trump’s many lies.

“Our overriding consideration must be who has the best hope of saving our democracy from an authoritarian takeover by a criminal and his gang,” he continued, noting that the Supreme Court had only the day before created a “law-free zone around the President.”

“President Biden saved our democracy by delivering us from Trump in 2020. He must not deliver us to Trump in 2024.”

Doggett referred to President Lyndon Johnson, who “made the painful decision to withdraw” from the 1968 election due to his waning popularity against Richard Nixon. “President Biden should do the same,” Doggett said.

Biden’s lackluster performance at last week’s presidential debate, in which he gave lengthy, often incoherent answers and repeatedly failed to refute Trump’s dangerously inaccurate claims, has created growing waves of dissent throughout the previously united Democratic Party. In the debate’s wake, Democrats have started pushing for Biden to step aside, so that a younger candidate can take up the mantle of securing the White House.

This dissent may only continue to grow among Democratic lawmakers. While the Biden campaign has rushed to assure donors and activists that the president is still up for the task of defeating Trump, there has been little outreach to the Democrats on Capitol Hill, according to Politico.

Democratic Senate hopeful Tim Ryan, who previously served in the House of Representatives from 2003 to 2023, also called Tuesday for the president to withdraw from the presidential race. Unlike Doggett, he made a pitch for who should replace Biden: Vice President Kamala Harris.

“We have to rip the band aid off! Too much is at stake,” Ryan wrote in a post on X, sharing the link to a Newsweek opinion piece arguing for Harris’s candidacy. Ryan also shared a link to a new CNN poll that found that Harris was polling slightly better than Biden against Trump.

Representative James Clyburn said during an interview on MSNBC Tuesday that he would also support Harris if Biden “were to step aside.” While Clyburn did not call for the president to withdraw from the race, his comment might mark a significant defection from the South Carolina Democrat, whose endorsement was something of a linchpin for Biden’s nomination in 2020.

Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump’s former lawyer and New York City’s former mayor, is now a former practicing attorney. He was disbarred by the state of New York Tuesday.  

Giuliani is “disbarred from the practice of law, effective immediately, and until the further order of this Court, and his name stricken from the roll of attorneys and counselors-at-law in the State of New York,” ruled a New York appeals court, citing his many false statements about the 2020 presidential election.

“The seriousness of respondent’s misconduct cannot be overstated,” the court wrote. “[Giuliani] flagrantly misused his prominent position as the personal attorney for former President Trump and his campaign, through which [he] repeatedly and intentionally made false statements, some of which were perjurious, to the federal court, state lawmakers, the public … and this Court concerning the 2020 Presidential election, in which he baselessly attacked and undermined the integrity of this country’s electoral process.”

A spokesperson for Giuliani, Ted Goodman, issued a statement decrying the disbarment.

“Members of the legal community who respect the rule of law in this country should immediately come forward and speak out against this politically and ideologically corrupted decision. We will be appealing this objectively flawed decision in hopes that the appellate process will restore integrity into our system of justice,” the statement said.

The onetime presidential candidate keeps sinking lower and lower. Giuliani filed for bankruptcy in 2023 but is still spending lavishly and ignoring his many creditors. Desperately trying to make money, he has resorted to selling his own brand of coffee but can’t find a new accountant after his old one dropped him. One of his former cronies, Lev Parnas, spilled the beans on how Giuliani tried to manufacture a Biden-Ukraine scandal, something that Giuliani still hasn’t given up on.

Will Giuliani dial back on the behavior that got him disbarred, or will he go into overdrive? He was indicted in Arizona for his election machinations there, and doubled down on his allegations of fraud. He had a pitiful defense for his actions: highlighting all of the states where he challenged election results. He even taunted the Arizona attorney general in trying to dodge a subpoena, only to be served near his Florida residence anyway. And Trump still hasn’t paid him for all of that legal work, either.

The bar taps at Donald Trump’s New Jersey clubs are running dry, and it’s not clear when the booze will start flowing again.

Liquor licenses for two of the former president’s clubs in the Garden State expired Sunday as state officials weigh whether Trump’s criminal conviction in his New York hush-money trial prevents him from ever renewing the beverage license. In the meantime, the New Jersey Division of Alcoholic Beverage Control issued interim permits to allow Trump National Golf Club Colts Neck and Trump National Golf Club Bedminster to temporarily sell alcohol until a hearing to determine the clubs’ future beverage sales is held on July 19.

That’s a little more than a week after Trump is scheduled to be sentenced in the criminal trial, though that date might be further delayed as Trump’s attorneys fight the conviction on the basis of a Monday Supreme Court ruling that expanded the boundaries of presidential immunity.

“The final judgment of conviction that raises the prospect of disqualifying Mr. Trump from an interest in a New Jersey liquor license due to the guilty verdict in New York will not be entered until after his sentencing,” a spokesman for the New Jersey attorney general’s office told The Hill, adding that the burden of proof remains on the applicant to prove they meet the requirements for the license.

The Trump Organization has pushed back on the New Jersey investigation, arguing that the conviction should be irrelevant to the clubs’ operation as Trump himself is not the holder of the liquor licenses.

“As previously stated, President Trump is not the holder of any liquor license in New Jersey, and he is not an officer, director or operator of any entity that holds a liquor license in New Jersey,” a spokesperson for the Trump Organization told The Hill. “These liquor licenses support the livelihoods of many hundreds of hard working New Jersey residents, including bartenders, waiters and waitresses, they service thousands of members, and they contribute millions of dollars to the revenue streams of the State of New Jersey. We sincerely hope that this investigation is not political in nature, and given the foregoing, we feel confident that our licenses will remain unaffected.”

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. allegedly sexually assaulted a babysitter more than two decades ago, according to an exclusive story from Vanity Fair.

In 1998, Kennedy and his second wife, Mary Richardson, hired a 23-year-old babysitter named Eliza Cooney, who moved into their family home to watch their four children. Kennedy’s inappropriate behavior toward Cooney began one night in 1998, when he started rubbing his hand up and down her thigh under the kitchen table. Cooney wrote in her diary that she wasn’t sure whether “he was on something or really tired or was missing Mary or was testing me.”

Kennedy later appeared in her bedroom, perusing the intimate details of her life in her diary, and asked her to rub his back with lotion, an incident that she told Vanity Fair was “totally inappropriate.”

In another instance, he came up behind her as she searched for something in the pantry, and began groping her hips, rib cage, and chest, and didn’t stop until interrupted by another staff member. “My back was to the door of the pantry, and he came up behind me,” said Cooney. “I was frozen. Shocked.”

Cooney left the family a few months later, writing in her diary that she wanted to leave “bad men” behind in 1999. She kept the alleged sexual assault a secret until 2017, when she finally told her mother.

In 2023, when Kennedy announced he was running against Democratic incumbent President Joe Biden, Cooney opted not to file a civil suit against her former boss, but ultimately decided to take her story public regardless.

According to several people close to the family, this was far from Kennedy’s only marital indiscretion, but it marks a trend of sexually aggressive behavior by the struggling presidential candidate. A former friend of Richardson’s told Vanity Fair that Richardson called Kennedy a “sex addict” and said he was taking medication for it. The two divorced in 2010 when Kennedy began a relationship with actress Cheryl Hines. Hines and Kennedy married in 2014.

The Kennedy campaign did not respond to Vanity Fair’s requests for comment.

According to the report, Kennedy’s alleged sexual deviancy doesn’t end there. When he was still married to Richardson, he sent his friends nude photographs of women on several occasions. His friends told Vanity Fair that they believed he had taken the pictures himself, although they weren’t sure the women had consented to being photographed or having the images passed on.

In another strange texting incident, last year, Kennedy sent his friend a photo of him on vacation in Korea, holding up and pretending to eat the barbecued carcass of a dog. The picture’s metadata indicated that the photograph was taken in 2010, the same year that Kennedy was diagnosed with a brain worm, which he claims is responsible for his brain fog.

Kennedy’s reckless texting habits seemed to stump many of his friends, who knew he had political aspirations and a desire to protect his family’s name. It seems that neither of these goals could rein in the anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist, convinced that he could do whatever he wanted and get away with it.

The Supreme Court declined Tuesday to take up a challenge to Illinois’s ban on assault weapons, though not every justice on the high court agreed with the decision to do so.

In a separate opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas appeared keen to uproot future bans, urging the court to take up another such case on the basis that some semiautomatic guns, such as the AR-15, are among the most popular weapons in the nation, thereby claiming that more guidance is needed to delineate which weapons are “dangerous” and “unusual.” He further called the Seventh Circuit’s decision to uphold the state ban, which stemmed from a landmark 2008 Supreme Court decision that ruled that military grade weapons such as M-16 rifles are not protected under the Second Amendment, as “nonsensical.”

“The Seventh Circuit’s contrived ‘non-militaristic’ limitation on the Arms protected by the Second Amendment seems unmoored from both text and history,” Thomas wrote. “It is difficult to see how the Seventh Circuit could have concluded that the most widely owned semiautomatic rifles are not ‘Arms’ protected by the Second Amendment.”

The Illinois ban was instituted after a 2022 Independence Day parade shooting in Chicago’s Highland Park took the lives of seven people and injured 48 others. The law prohibits the sale of semiautomatic “assault weapons,” which are commonly used in mass shootings, including the AK-47 and AR-15 rifles, as well as the sale of some handguns. The ban also forbids the sale of magazines that use more than 10 rounds for long weapons, or 15 rounds for handguns, as well as rapid-fire devices known as “switches” that convert semiautomatic weapons into automatic machine guns.

“This assault weapons ban is a step in the right direction,” Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker said at a press conference following the law’s passage. “But there’s no magic fix, no single law that will end gun violence once and for all. So we must keep fighting, voting, and protesting to ensure that future generations will only have to read about massacres like Highland Park, Sandy Hook, and Uvalde in their history books. It’s our burden and our mandate, one that we carry with solemn honor for our children who will grow up in a better and safer world.”

This is not the first time this term that Thomas has sought to dramatically expand access to deadly weapons. Last month, he joined the majority decision to overturn a federal ban on bump stocks and dissented from a ruling barring domestic abusers from owning guns.

The U.S. Supreme Court announced Tuesday that it is sending a whopping nine cases back to the lower courts after its ruling in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the first sign of the chaos from overturning the Chevron deference.

The court ruled Friday to upend Chevron, a 40-year-old doctrine that requires judges to defer to a federal agency when determining the meaning of any ambiguous laws that agency should try to enforce. In his majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that, instead, “Courts must exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority, as the [Administrative Procedures Act] requires.”

The decision in Loper Bright now allows the federal judiciary to play pretend as scientists and policymakers, while stripping the administrative agencies that are staffed by experts who get their directives from democratically elected officials with the power to determine policy. As a result, several cases with questions about ambiguous language are now headed back to the lower courts.

For example, of the cases that have been remanded back to the appeals courts, there are four cases that have to do with the interpretation of ambiguous language in the Immigration and Nationality Act—a law enforced by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, an agency under the authority of the Department of Homeland Security, which is run by Biden-appointed Homeland Security Secretary Alejando Mayorkas.

Now the question will no longer be referred to immigration experts at the department, or to policymakers representing the current administration, but left to the discretion of appeals judges in the Fourth, Ninth and Eleventh Circuits.

Other questions sent back to the lower courts have to do with energy, agriculture, labor practices, and the Internal Revenue Service to name a few.

In the wake of Loper Bright, right-wing judges—who have pushed for years to oppose Chevron and embrace deregulation—have the functional ability to veto any new federal regulation they decide is too “ambiguous.” As these cases continue to pile up, which they no doubt will, the law will no longer be determined by Congress, or even the executive branch, but by injunction.

The Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity means that the president can attempt to overturn elections, according to one of Trump’s lawyers.

Will Scharf told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins Monday night that “alternate slates of electors have been a method used by previous presidents, most notably Ulysses S. Grant, to ensure the integrity of prior elections.”

“We believe the assembly of those alternate slates of electors was an official act of the presidency,” Scharf said, referring to the attempts by Trump allies to subvert the 2020 election results in different states. “That’s what we argued before the Supreme Court.”

After the 2020 election, Trump and his allies tried to present fake electors in states across America to flip results in his favor, including Georgia, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, New Mexico, Nevada, and Arizona, resulting in criminal charges in many cases. In Georgia, Trump himself was charged, along with 18 of his allies, but the case is in limbo while an appeals court considers whether prosecutor Fani Willis should be thrown off of the case.

The nation’s highest court seems to have opened the floodgates for any kind of presidential crimes, so long as the president can argue it was an “official” act. Now, sitting presidents can argue they cannot be prosecuted, evidence cannot be collected against them, and the Justice Department is not independent of the White House. There are probably more devastating interpretations yet to come. Meanwhile, Trump is attempting to get his hush-money conviction thrown out over how some of the evidence was collected.

The work to undo Donald Trump’s criminal charges—and his recent conviction—in light of the Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity has already begun.

Hours after the ruling Monday, the former president’s legal team requested that Judge Juan Merchan set aside Trump’s hush-money conviction and delay the sentencing scheduled for next week, citing the Supreme Court’s expansion of presidential immunity.

Trump’s attorneys argued that some evidence presented in the case constituted official presidential acts, according to a copy of a letter obtained by the Associated Press. That could refer to some of the communication Trump had about his former fixer Michael Cohen, which his legal team had previously attempted to redact from the trial on the same presidential immunity claim. But that was before the Supreme Court expanded the definition of immunity.

“Under our constitutional structure of separated powers, the nature of Presidential power entitles a former President to absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority,” read the consequential ruling. “There is no immunity for unofficial acts.”

The high court’s decision already effectively killed Trump’s federal election interference trial, which sought to hold Trump accountable for his role in the effort to overturn the 2020 election results and the far-right mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol building on January 6. Now it could overturn one of the few cases where Trump is being held accountable.

Trump was accused of using Cohen to sweep an affair with porn star Stormy Daniels under the rug ahead of the 2016 presidential election. He was convicted on 34 felony charges in May for allegedly falsifying business records with the intent to further an underlying crime in the first degree. Merchan could sentence Trump to up to four years in prison on the charges. He could also impose probation, supervised release, or order Trump to do community service or pay fines.