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President-elect Donald J. Trump is trying to expunge his conviction before he is inaugurated. He would be the first felon elected to the Oval Office.
Jan. 7, 2025Updated 11:51 a.m. ET
President-elect Donald J. Trump on Tuesday intensified a last-minute effort to avoid his criminal sentencing in New York, urging an appeals court to intervene and halt the proceeding.
In a filing with the First Department of the state’s Appellate Division, Mr. Trump’s lawyers sought an emergency stay of the sentencing, which is scheduled for Friday, 10 days before his presidential inauguration. The lawyers argued that Mr. Trump was entitled to full immunity from prosecution, and even sentencing, now that he is the president-elect.
The sentencing, his lawyers wrote, “threatens irreparable harm and deprivation” of Mr. Trump’s constitutional rights.
“To go forward with a sentencing, with its inevitable threat of stigma, opprobrium and potential criminal penalties, would pose risks to America’s vital interests that are intolerable and unconstitutional,” wrote one of the lawyers, Todd Blanche.
The lawyers also filed an action in the appeals court against the trial judge overseeing the case, Juan M. Merchan, challenging two of his recent decisions to uphold a New York jury’s verdict against Mr. Trump.
The filings marked an escalation of Mr. Trump’s long-running effort to fend off sentencing and unwind his conviction, to avoid becoming the first felon to occupy the Oval Office. Ever since the jury convicted him in May on 34 felony counts of falsifying records to cover up a sex scandal, Mr. Trump has attacked the verdict on various fronts, including demanding that Justice Merchan throw out the case.
