No, he’s not going to jail. But yes, Donald Trump is now, officially, a convicted felon, and will officially enter office with that status.
Trump was convicted last spring on all 34 counts in the New York case involving falsified business records and hush money payments to Stormy Daniels. None of Trump’s other criminal cases ever progressed past the indictment phase, but the New York case proceeded to the verdict.
And while Trump’s election to the presidency made fairly clear that he would not go to prison, the former and future president on Friday was sentenced in that case. Per CNN, Trump has been sentenced to unconditional discharge in the case. He will not be “imprisoned, fined or face probation,” but the case has not been dismissed, and the conviction still stands. This means that Trump will enter office as president as a convicted felon, a first in American history.
Supreme Court won’t block Donald Trump’s hush money sentencing https://t.co/QLZOceFHbZ
— POLITICO (@politico) January 10, 2025
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Judge Juan Mercan said from the bench that Trump’s election to the presidency “do not reduce the seriousness of the crime or justify its commission in any way,” adding that “one power they do not provide is the power to erase a jury verdict.”
Earlier this, the U.S. Supreme Court turned down Trump’s request to halt the New York sentencing, in a 5-4 decison in which Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Comey Barrett joined the liberals in siding against Trump.
Soon after the decision, Trump posted to Truth Social about the decision, calling it “another pathetic, unAmerican Witch Hunt.”
“THERE IS NO CASE, THERE WAS NEVER A CASE, and this whole Scam fully deserves to be DISMISSED,” Trump said. “The real Jury, the American People, have spoken, by Re-Electing me with an overwhelming MANDATE in one of the most consequential Elections in History. As the American People have seen, this “case” had no crime, no damages, no proof, no facts, no Law, only a highly conflicted Judge, a star witness who is a disbarred, disgraced, serial perjurer, and criminal Election Interference.”
The Radical Democrats have lost another pathetic, unAmerican Witch Hunt. After spending tens of millions of dollars, wasting over 6 years of obsessive work that should have been spent on protecting New Yorkers from violent, rampant crime that is destroying the City and State,…
— Donald J. Trump Posts From His Truth Social (@TrumpDailyPosts) January 10, 2025
Photo courtesy of the Political Tribune media library.