By Jack Queen
NEW YORK (Reuters) -A judge on Monday ruled that Donald Trump’s conviction for falsifying records to cover up a sex scandal should stand, rejecting the U.S. president-elect’s argument that a recent Supreme Court ruling nullified the verdict, a court filing showed.
Trump’s lawyers argued that having the case hang over him during his presidency would impede his ability to govern. He was initially scheduled to be sentenced on Nov. 26, but Justice Juan Merchan pushed that back indefinitely after Trump defeated Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris in the Nov. 5 election.
Prosecutors with Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office, which brought the case, said there were measures short of the “extreme remedy” of overturning the jury’s verdict that could assuage Trump’s concerns about being distracted by a criminal case while serving as president.
The case stemmed from a $130,000 payment that Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen made to adult film actor Stormy Daniels. The payment was for her silence before the 2016 election about a sexual encounter she has said she had a decade earlier with Trump, who denies it.
A Manhattan jury in May found Trump guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records to cover up the payment. It was the first time a U.S. president – former or sitting – had been convicted of or charged with a criminal offense.
Trump pleaded not guilty and called the case an attempt by Bragg, a Democrat, to harm his 2024 campaign.
(Reporting by Eric Beech, Luc Cohen and Jack Queen, Editing by Rosalba O’Brien and Matthew Lewis)
