Harry Litman - Securing History's Verdict

The once-immense landscape of Donald Trump’s potential criminal liability has been reduced to a small patch of turf defined by whether his conviction on 34 felony counts will stand. Trump is now engaged in an all-out campaign to sweep it away by avoiding the sentencing scheduled for this Friday, January 10. Earlier today, he lost round one when the appellate division of the New York State courts refused, after a brief hearing, to grant his motion for an emergency stay.

The stakes of this skirmish, which will be fought in multiple courts over the next 2 1/2 days, are enormous. Through a wildly improbable series of legal and political twists that historians will analyze for decades, Trump now stands at the threshold of erasing a long series of crimes from the record books. The New York state convictions are all that remain, and if he can delay sentencing until he assumes office, he can claim that the law never truly touched him.

But first, he needs to wriggle out from under Merchan’s sentencing order and break Friday’s date. Merchan’s order followed his decision rejecting Trump’s arguments for reversal of the verdict based on the Supreme Court’s immunity opinion in Trump v. United States. Merchan also denied Trump’s claim that the Constitution requires an immediate shutdown of the case because he is about to become President.

The appellate division was Trump’s first attempt. Next, he will likely appeal to the New York Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court, and possibly to the U.S. Supreme Court, which has showered him with its kindness in the past. And he also may try to open a separate exclusively federal channel focused on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals.

https://harrylitman.substack.com/p/securing-historys-verdict