Politics
Donald Trump’s new sentencing date in New York? That could be delayed, too.
It wasn’t surprising when Judge Juan Merchan on Friday postponed Donald Trump’s New York state sentencing until after the presidential election. After all, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office all but agreed with Trump’s delay request.
But Merchan not only set a new sentencing date for Nov. 26, pushing it back most recently from Sept. 18. The judge also pushed back the date for ruling on Trump’s motion to set aside his guilty verdicts based on the Supreme Court’s immunity rulingfrom Sept. 16 to Nov. 12.
But this new schedule risks even further delay.
When Trump’s lawyers asked Merchan last month to push back the sentencing, they told him that if he ruled on Sept. 16 against Trump’s immunity claim, then they were immediately going to seek to challenge his ruling on appeal before any sentencing could take place. “The requested adjournment is also necessary to allow President Trump adequate time to assess and pursue state and federal appellate options in response to any adverse ruling,” they wroteadding that “a single business day is an unreasonably short period of time for President Trump to seek to vindicate these rights.”
Putting aside whether Trump’s immunity claim in the so-called hush money case has any merit, it’s true that, had Merchan rejected that claim on Sept. 16 while keeping the Sept. 18 sentencing, there was a good chance that that sentencing wouldn’t have happened as scheduled. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office effectively agreed with that notion, writing to Merchan last month that:
Assuming that defendant seeks an interim stay of the sentencing hearing immediately after this Court’s September 16 ruling, the People respectfully note that an appellate court considering such a request will understand that, without an interim stay, it would have to receive briefing and decide certain issues of first impression in one day.
So it made some sense for Merchan to delay the sentencing. That is, it made sense as much as anything can after the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling in the federal election interference case. That ruling shouldn’t have called into question Trump’s state prosecution for covering up a private hush money scheme, but here we are.
So the decision to push to November a ruling on Trump’s motion to set aside his guilty verdicts means that, if Merchan rules against Trump at that point, Trump’s appellate challenges will still need to play out; that’s his lawyers’ stated intention, at least. There’s now more space between that ruling and sentencing — from Sept. 16 and 18 to Nov. 12 and 26, respectively.
Would it take less than two weeks to address Trump’s challenges before his state sentencing could go forward? Especially if those challenges include a trip to the Supreme Court, whose immunity ruling helped Trump get to this point? We won’t know the answer until after the election — again, that’s if Merchan rejects Trump’s immunity claim — and much else can happen between now and then, legally and politically.
But whatever happens at the ballot box, we shouldn’t carve this new sentencing date into stone just yet, however delayed it has already been.
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Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro,” a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined BLN, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
The U.S. delegation in Seattle includes HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Energy Secretary Chris Wright, according to a FIFA official, along with White House FIFA World Cup Task Force czar Andrew Giuliani. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy were among those who attended the U.S.’ first match, against Paraguay.
Britain wouldn’t have its latest likely next prime minister if not for soccer.
Andy Burnham, the former Greater Manchester mayor elected to the U.K. Parliament in a closely-watched by-election on Thursday, is expected to oust Prime Minister Keir Starmer as Labour Party leader in a matter of weeks. The sport propelled his political rise.
The pivotal moment of Burnham’s long political career came in 2009, when he was the Cabinet minister for culture, media and sport under then-PM Gordon Brown. Burnham was asked to return to his native Liverpool for a memorial commemorating the Hillsborough Disaster.
The 1989 event remains Britain’s worst-ever sporting catastrophe. Almost 100 Liverpool fans were crushed to death at a cup game in South Yorkshire, following a series of disastrous crowd control errors by police chiefs and stadium staff.
The horror of the day was compounded in the immediate aftermath, when police sought to cover up their mistakes by falsely blaming drunken Liverpool fans for the crush. The lies were amplified by a willing national media and allowed to linger for years; the city grieved and demanded justice. Bereaved families campaigned for years. But no one listened, and no one was held accountable.
Born in Liverpool and steeped in soccer culture, Burnham knew all this as he headed to the memorial at Liverpool’s Anfield stadium 20 years later. He was well aware how a young government envoy would be greeted by the crowd, still raging at the injustice two decades on. But to his credit, he went anyway — and was met with a wall of heckles, chants and protest songs from the part of Anfield, known as the Kop, where the team’s loudest supporters congregate. (The video of his halting, shattered-looking appearance is well worth watching.)
Burnham — until then a typical career politician in Westminster — has described the day as a seminal moment. He returned to Cabinet and demanded a new inquiry into Hillsborough. Three years later its report revealed every claim made by the justice campaigners — of police failures and a scandalous cover-up — had been true. The government was forced to apologize.
Burnham was widely praised for his role in exposing the truth about Hillsborough. But more significant in his ultimate rise to power would be the shift in his own psyche. “I always say that I took my first steps out of Westminster on 15 April 2009 when I walked out to face the Kop,” he wrote in his memoir, “Head North,” penned with close friend (and Hillsborough survivor) Steve Rotheram. “Things were never the same after that day.”
Burnham says his experiences dealing with the Hillsborough justice campaign shaped his view of the Westminster political machine, as an arrogant and failing institution which ignores English regions outside of London. Eight years later he would quit Westminster altogether to become a mayor in his native northwest.
Fast-forward to 2026, and Burnham finds himself in an enviable position — an experienced politician able to cast himself as a political outsider ready to take on the Westminster elites. (While Starmer supports the North London-based champions Arsenal, Burnham is a season ticket holder at his beloved Everton F.C., and is regularly photographed jogging in a vintage Everton jersey.) It’s a familiar narrative which chimes with disgruntled voters everywhere.
Read Jack’s Blue Light News Magazine profile of Andy Burnham here and Blue Light News’s full coverage of the Makerfield by-election and its unfolding fallout here.
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