Supreme Court Is Trump’s Last Chance To Cancel Sentencing After Ny's Highest Court Declines To Intervene

NEW YORK — New York’s highest court on Thursday rejected President-elect Donald Trump’s attempt to delay his Friday sentencing for his hush money conviction.

The rebuff appears to leave the Supreme Court as Trump’s last remaining hope to scuttle the hearing as the clock ticks toward the sentencing, set for 9:30 a.m. on Friday. The judge overseeing Trump’s sentencing, Justice Juan Merchan, has indicated he will not sentence the president-elect to jail time and has said Trump can attend virtually.

Trump has asked the Supreme Court to halt the proceeding, citing what he says are national security risks in distracting him from his duties related to the presidential transition just days before his inauguration.

The chief clerk of the New York Court of Appeals notified an attorney for Trump in a brief letter on Thursday morning that his request to halt the sentencing for Trump’s criminal conviction was reviewed by Judge Jenny Rivera, who declined to block it. No explanation for the decision was offered. Last May, a New York jury found Trump guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business documents.

The announcement from the New York court came minutes before Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office told the Supreme Court in response to Trump’s effort that “there is no basis” for the court to intervene, saying it lacks jurisdiction.

And, Bragg’s prosecutors wrote, the court should reject Trump’s claims that he is protected by presidential immunity even as president-elect.

Bragg’s lawyers told the justices that Trump is making “the unprecedented claim that the temporary presidential immunity he will possess in the future fully immunizes him now, weeks before he even takes the oath of office, from all state-court criminal process.”

“This extraordinary immunity claim is unsupported by any decision from any court,” they wrote. “It is axiomatic that there is only one President at a time.”

Bragg’s office also disputed Trump’s argument that the sentencing should be halted while he tries to overturn Merchan’s ruling that certain evidence during the trial was properly used despite the Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity last summer. Trump is asking an intermediate appeals court to toss the verdict based on those arguments. That effort won’t be resolved until after Trump’s sentencing.

And, prosecutors noted, “there is a compelling public interest in proceeding to sentencing.”