New York appeals court judge refuses to halt Donald Trump's sentencing

New York: A New York appellate court Tuesday declined to halt President-elect Donald Trump's criminal sentencing, setting back his hopes of shutting down the case before returning to the White House.

Trump, who is scheduled to face sentencing Friday, 10 days before being sworn in for a second presidential term, had asked the appeals court to intervene and freeze the proceeding.

His lawyers argued that Trump was entitled to full immunity from prosecution, and even sentencing, now that he was the president-elect.

The emergency application fell to a single appellate court judge, Ellen Gesmer, who held a brief hearing Tuesday before denying Trump's request 30 minutes later.

At the hearing, Gesmer appeared highly skeptical of Trump's arguments, grilling Trump's lawyer about whether he had "any support for a notion that presidential immunity extends to president-elects?"

The lawyer, Todd Blanche, conceded that he did not, saying: "There has never been a case like this before."

And when Blanche argued that Gesmer's decision hinged on the immunity of a sitting president, she cut him off with a correction, noting that Trump was currently the president-elect.

Yet Gesmer might not have the final word. Trump can now race to federal court in hopes of staving off the sentencing, and if that fails, could ask the Supreme Court to intervene.

For now, though, Gesmer's decision narrowed Trump's path to victory, enhancing the chances he will face the embarrassing spectacle of a criminal sentencing.

The proceeding, should it happen, will be largely symbolic. The trial judge overseeing the case, Juan Merchan, signaled last week that he would spare Trump jail time or any other substantive punishment.

The leniency appeared to resonate with Gesmer, who highlighted it during the hearing and questioned Blanche about why she shouldn't "treat that seriously."

Blanche, who has been tapped by Trump to become the deputy attorney general in his administration, did not respond to questions from reporters as he left the courthouse. A spokesperson for the Manhattan district attorney's office, which prosecuted Trump, declined to comment.

Trump's effort to attack the district attorney's case will not stop with the failed emergency request.

His lawyers this week filed an action in the appeals court against Merchan that challenged his recent decisions to uphold Trump's conviction. That action, which could take weeks or months to resolve, coincided with Trump's more urgent request for an emergency stay of the sentencing.

The one-two punch marked an aggressive escalation of Trump's legal strategy as he hopes to avoid a public sentencing. Ever since a New York jury convicted him in May on 34 felony counts of falsifying records to cover up a sex scandal, Trump has attacked the verdict on various fronts, including demanding that Merchan throw out the case and postpone the sentencing.

The approach reflects one of Trump's favorite legal tools: delay.

After being indicted four times in four jurisdictions, Trump leaned heavily on that strategy, making a variety of appeals and other filings to run out the clock until Election Day.

When he won the election in November, the strategy paid off: The federal special counsel who had brought two of those cases -- one in Washington, D.C., and the other in Florida -- shut them down, thanks to a Justice Department policy prohibiting prosecutions of sitting presidents.

And in Georgia, where Trump is accused of trying to overturn the state's 2020 election results, an appeals court disqualified the local prosecutor who brought the case, delaying it indefinitely.

In New York, Merchan delayed the sentencing numerous times. He first postponed it in July to weigh Trump's effort to have the case thrown out based on a recent Supreme Court decision granting presidents broad immunity for their official actions.

The judge punted again in the fall to accommodate the presidential campaign, and after the election, Merchan paused the sentencing once more to consider the president-elect's argument that his electoral victory should nullify the case.

On Tuesday, Gesmer noted these delays and attributed the purported time crunch -- with the sentencing coming so close to the inauguration -- to Trump's many legal maneuvers.

"Justice Merchan would have been happy to hold this sentencing back in July," Gesmer said.