Donald Trump sentenced to unconditional discharge in hush money case: judge

Trump faces sentencing for hush money conviction in a historic moment, with potential no-penalty sentence before inauguration.

A judge sentenced Donald Trump to an unconditional discharge on Friday (January 10, 2025) for covering up hush money payments to a porn star despite the U.S. president-elect’s last-ditch efforts to avoid becoming the first felon in the White House.

“This court has determined that the only lawful sentence that permits entry of a judgement of conviction without encroaching on the highest office of the land, is an unconditional discharge,” said New York judge Juan Merchan delivering the sentence during a court session that Mr. Trump attended virtually.

The hush money case accused Mr. Trump of fudging his business’ records to veil a $130,000 payoff to porn actor Stormy Daniels. She was paid, late in Mr. 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.

Mr. Bragg’s office said in a court filing Monday (January 6, 2025) that Mr. Trump committed “serious offences 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 Mr. Trump’s political rise. Prosecutors said Daniels was paid off – through Mr. Trump’s personal attorney at the time, Michael Cohen – as part of a wider effort to keep voters from hearing about Mr. Trump’s alleged extramarital escapades.

Mr. 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, Mr. Trump says that’s simply what they were.