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By Kayode Sanni-Arewa

President-elect Donald Trump was sentenced Friday in his hush money case, but the judge declined to impose any punishment, an outcome that cements his conviction but frees him to return to the White House unencumbered by the threat of a jail term or a fine.

Trump’s sentence of an unconditional discharge caps a norm-smashing case that saw the former and future president charged with 34 felonies, put on trial for almost two months and convicted by a jury on every count. Yet, the legal detour — and sordid details aired in court of a plot to bury affair allegations — didn’t hurt him with voters, who elected him to a second term.

Manhattan Judge Juan M. Merchan could have sentenced the 78-year-old Republican to up to four years in prison. Instead, he chose a sentence that sidestepped thorny constitutional issues by effectively ending the case but assured that Trump will become the first person convicted of a felony to assume the presidency.

Merchan said that like when facing any other defendant, he must consider any aggravating factors before imposing a sentence, but the legal protection that Trump will have as president “is a factor that overrides all others.”

“Despite the extraordinary breadth of those legal protections, one power they do not provide is that they do not erase a jury verdict,” Merchan said.

Trump, briefly addressing the court as he appeared virtually from his Florida home, said his criminal trial and conviction has “been a very terrible experience” and insisted he committed no crime.

The Republican former president, appearing on a video feed 10 days before he is inaugurated, again pilloried the case, the only one of his four criminal indictments that has gone to trial and possibly the only one that ever will.

“It’s been a political witch hunt. It was done to damage my reputation so that I would lose the election, and obviously, that didn’t work,” Trump said.

Trump called the case “a weaponization of government” and “an embarrassment to New York.”

With Trump 10 days from inauguration, Merchan had indicated he planned a no-penalty sentence called an unconditional discharge, and prosecutors didn’t oppose it.

Prosecutors said Friday that they supported a no-penalty sentence, but they chided Trump’s attacks on the legal system throughout and after the case.

“The once and future President of the United States has engaged in a coordinated campaign to undermine its legitimacy,” prosecutor Joshua Steinglass said.

Rather than show remorse, Trump has “bred disdain” for the jury verdict and the criminal justice system, Steinglass said, and his calls for retaliation against those involved in the case, including calling for the judge to be disbarred, “has caused enduring damage to public perception of the criminal justice system and has put officers of the court in harm’s way.”

As he appeared from his Florida home, the former president was seated with his lawyer Todd Blanche, whom he’s tapped to serve as the second-highest ranking Justice Department official in his incoming administration.

“Legally, this case should not have been brought,” Blanche said, reiterating Trump’s intention to appeal the verdict. That technically can’t happen until he’s sentenced.

Trump, a Republican, becomes the first person convicted of a felony to assume the presidency.

The judge had indicated that he planned the unconditional discharge — a rarity in felony convictions — partly to avoid complicated constitutional issues that would have arisen if he imposed a penalty that overlapped with Trump’s presidency.

Before the hearing, a handful of Trump supporters and critics gathered outside. One group held a banner that read, “Trump is guilty.” The other held one that said, “Stop partisan conspiracy” and “Stop political witch hunt.”

The hush money case accused Trump of fudging his business’ records to veil a $130,000 payoff to porn actor Stormy Daniels. She was paid, late in Trump’s 2016 campaign, not to tell the public about a sexual encounter she maintains the two had a decade earlier. He says nothing sexual happened between them, and he contends that his political adversaries spun up a bogus prosecution to try to damage him.

“I never falsified business records. It is a fake, made up charge,” the Republican president-elect wrote on his Truth Social platform last week. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, whose office brought the charges, is a Democrat.

Bragg’s office said in a court filing Monday that Trump committed “serious offenses that caused extensive harm to the sanctity of the electoral process and to the integrity of New York’s financial marketplace.”

While the specific charges were about checks and ledgers, the underlying accusations were seamy and deeply entangled with Trump’s political rise. Prosecutors said Daniels was paid off — through Trump’s personal attorney at the time, Michael Cohen — as part of a wider effort to keep voters from hearing about Trump’s alleged extramarital escapades.

Trump denies the alleged encounters occurred. His lawyers said he wanted to squelch the stories to protect his family, not his campaign. And while prosecutors said Cohen’s reimbursements for paying Daniels were deceptively logged as legal expenses, Trump says that’s simply what they were.

“There was nothing else it could have been called,” he wrote on Truth Social last week, adding, “I was hiding nothing.”

Trump’s lawyers tried unsuccessfully to forestall a trial. Since his May conviction on 34 counts of falsifying business records, they have pulled virtually every legal lever within reach to try to get the conviction overturned, the case dismissed or at least the sentencing postponed.

The Trump attorneys have leaned heavily into assertions of presidential immunity from prosecution, and they got a boost in July from a Supreme Court decision that affords former commanders-in-chief considerable immunity.

Trump was a private citizen and presidential candidate when Daniels was paid in 2016. He was president when the reimbursements to Cohen were made and recorded the following year.

On one hand, Trump’s defense argued that immunity should have kept jurors from hearing some evidence, such as testimony about some of his conversations with then-White House communications director Hope Hicks.

And after Trump won this past November’s election, his lawyers argued that the case had to be scrapped to avoid impinging on his upcoming presidency and his transition to the Oval Office.

Merchan, a Democrat, repeatedly postponed the sentencing, initially set for July. But last week, he set Friday’s date, citing a need for “finality.” He wrote that he strove to balance Trump’s need to govern, the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling, the respect due a jury verdict and the public’s expectation that “no one is above the law.”

Trump’s lawyers then launched a flurry of last-minute efforts to block the sentencing. Their last hope vanished Thursday night with a 5-4 Supreme Court ruling that declined to delay the sentencing.

Meanwhile, the other criminal cases that once loomed over Trump have ended or stalled ahead of trial.

After Trump’s election, special counsel Jack Smith closed out the federal prosecutions over Trump’s handling of classified documents and his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss to Democrat Joe Biden. A state-level Georgia election interference case is locked in uncertainty after prosecutor Fani Willis was removed from it. [AP]