By Luc Cohen
NEW YORK (Reuters) - A New York judge is set to decide this week whether President-elect Donald Trump's criminal conviction on charges involving hush money paid to a porn star should be overturned in light of the U.S. Supreme Court's July ruling on presidential immunity.
Justice Juan Merchan has said he will make his decision by Tuesday. It is the first of two pivotal choices that the judge must make after Trump's Nov. 5 election victory. Merchan also must decide whether to go ahead with sentencing Trump on Nov. 26 as currently scheduled. Legal experts have said sentencing now is unlikely to happen ahead of Trump's Jan. 20 inauguration.
A favorable ruling by Merchan for Trump on the immunity question or a sentencing delay would pave the way for him to return to the White House largely unencumbered by any of the four criminal cases that once appeared to threaten his ambitions to win back the White House.
Officials at the U.S. Justice Department are assessing how to wind down the two federal criminal cases brought against Trump by Special Counsel Jack Smith due to its longstanding policy against prosecuting a sitting president. A separate case in Georgia involving state criminal charges concerning Trump's efforts to overturn his 2020 presidential election loss remains in limbo.
Trump, 78, pleaded not guilty and denied wrongdoing in all four cases, which he portrayed as political persecutions by allies of Democratic President Joe Biden designed to thwart his campaign.
"It is now abundantly clear that Americans want an immediate end to the weaponization of our justice system," Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung said in a statement on Friday.
Trump in May became the first U.S. president to be convicted of a crime when a jury in Manhattan found him guilty of state charges of falsifying business records to cover up a potential sex scandal shortly before his first presidential victory in 2016. Trump has vowed to appeal the conviction after sentencing.
His lawyers have argued that the case must be dismissed following the Supreme Court's immunity ruling.
The Supreme Court, in a decision arising from one of Smith's two cases against Trump, decided that presidents are immune from prosecution involving their official acts, and that juries cannot be presented evidence of official acts in trials over personal conduct. It marked the first time that the court recognized any degree of presidential immunity from prosecution.
Trump's lawyers said the jury that convicted Trump was shown evidence by prosecutors of his social media posts as president and heard testimony from his former aides about conversations that occurred in the White House during his 2017-2021 term.
Prosecutors with the office of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, a Democrat, have argued that the Supreme Court's ruling has no bearing on the case, which they said concerned "wholly unofficial conduct." The Supreme Court in its ruling found no immunity for a president's unofficial acts.
"Even if the judge finds that some of the evidence should not have been introduced, it would not have changed the outcome of the jury's decision, and the court will not, therefore, dismiss the case on that basis," New York Law School professor Anna Cominsky said.
Even if Merchan allows the conviction to stand, experts expect Trump's lawyers to ask the judge to delay the sentencing. Trump faces a sentence of up to four years in prison after being convicted of 34 felony counts. Legal experts have said that while lesser penalties such as fines or probation are more likely, a prison sentence would not be impossible.