Judge postpones immunity decision on President-elect Donald Trump’s hush money conviction

The decision on whether to overturn President-elect Donald Trump’s conviction based on a claim of presidential immunity has been postponed until next week, officials said Tuesday.

Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan was scheduled to rule Tuesday on a defense motion seeking to overturn the jury’s verdict.

At the joint request of the prosecution and the defense, the court agreed to postpone the decision on the application until November 19th.

Merchan is scheduled to convict Trump on November 26th. He could receive a sentence between probation and four years in prison. Merchan had originally scheduled Trump’s sentencing for July. It was delayed after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that presidents were immune from prosecution for their official acts.

A Manhattan jury convicted Trump in May on 34 counts of falsifying business records to conceal $130,000 in hush money to cover up his affair with a former adult film actress. This cover-up, prosecutors alleged, was designed to hide the matter from American voters as Trump sought the presidency before the 2016 election.

The verdict was historic. Trump became the first American president to be convicted of a crime. In another first, Trump became the first American president to be convicted of contempt of court when Merchan ruled that Trump had violated a confidentiality agreement that prohibited him from publicly criticizing the jury or court staff.

Following the Supreme Court’s decision on presidential immunity, Trump defense attorneys Todd Blanche and Emil Bove argued that the Supreme Court’s decision should take precedence over the jury’s verdict and called for the jury’s verdict to be overturned.

Legal experts have also cited the U.S. Constitution’s “Supremacy Clause” – a legal principle of federal law that requires federal law to override state law.

Under the Supremacy Clause, states cannot prosecute a sitting president, experts said.

Manhattan prosecutors argued in court that Trump planned a “criminal conspiracy” to win the election about two months after he announced his first presidential bid in June 2015.

Along with his then-personal attorney Michael Cohen and tabloid publisher David Pecker, Trump carried out a series of “catch and kill” schemes by paying off people who allegedly had negative stories about Trump.

Adult film actress Stormy Daniels received $130,000; former Playboy model Karen McDougal, who is also said to have had an affair with Trump, received $150,000; Dino Sajudin, a bouncer at Trump Tower who spread the false story that Trump had fathered a child outside of his marriage, received $30,000.

Prosecutors said the payment was illegally recorded in the Trump Organization’s records as a legal service as part of a retainer agreement, but neither the retainer nor the legal services existed.

The charge of falsifying business records is a misdemeanor but was upgraded to a Class E felony by prosecutors. She argued the offenses were committed to cover up the crime of conspiring to promote an election by unlawful means.

Under the law, Trump did not have to have made the false entry himself, but rather had to have “made and caused a false entry” with “the intent to defraud in order to commit another crime,” according to legal instructions given to the jury by the judge had previously given. The deliberations began.

Cohen was later paid $420,000, which prosecutors said represented a partial reimbursement of the hush money payment to Daniels, prosecutors argued in court.

Trump’s lawyer Blanche argued that Trump’s payments to Cohen – $35,000 a month – were not repayments for the hush money but were simply for what the documents said: legal services. Cohen was still acting as Trump’s personal lawyer at the time, Blanche argued.

Trump was in the White House during this time and far from running his company, Blanche argued.