Judge postpones Trumps sentencing in Manhattan hush money case

A Manhattan judge has postponed Donald Trump’s sentencing on his conviction in his hush-money case — and said he’ll weigh scrapping the case entirely in light of voters electing Trump as president.Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan said he’ll consider claims from Trump’s lawyers that pressing on with such a case involving a president-elect would interfere with the “orderly transition of executive power” and be “uniquely destabilizing” to the country.The decision to pause Trump’s sentencing makes it overwhelmingly likely that the president-elect will re-enter the White House largely unscathed by the four criminal cases that had threatened to derail his campaign or even put him behind bars.Judge Merchan ordered Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and Trump’s lawyers to file their arguments in December on whether the case should be tossed, before the court issues its decision.Bragg has argued that the verdict should stand because the case was brought when Trump was a private citizen.The sentencing delay follows a two-year legal saga that reached a crescendo with the theatric spectacle of Trump, 78, spending six weeks inside a dingy Manhattan courtroom listening to salacious testimony from witnesses like porn star Stormy Daniels, who testified to having sex with him in 2006.Jurors saw evidence that Trump worked with his former fixer Michael Cohen and the National Enquirer magazine to buy up the rights to and bury damaging information about him, including Daniels’ tale about a brief tryst and Playboy Playmate Karen McDougal’s story about a months-long affair with Trump.“What do we got to pay for this? One-fifty?” Trump told Cohen in a secretly made recording, appearing to reference a $150,000 payoff to McDougal.The guilty verdict verdict against Trump in May branded him a convicted felon in the final months of his presidential campaign — but the president-elect used it as a rallying cry for his supporters, insisting that t...