Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs President-elect Donald J. Trump has signaled that he plans to mount a full-scale legal offensive to stave off his criminal sentencing in New York, seeking a last-minute reprieve before becoming the first president who is a convicted felon.With the sentencing scheduled for Friday, just 10 days before the presidential inauguration, Mr. Trump’s lawyers have implored the judge overseeing his case to postpone the proceeding, according to a court filing unsealed on Monday.Although that request is most likely doomed — the judge, Juan M. Merchan, was the one who scheduled the sentencing — Mr. Trump’s lawyers disclosed in the filing that they planned to escalate their effort. If the judge does not pause the sentencing by 2 p.m. on Monday, the filing said, Mr. Trump will “seek an emergency appellate review.”Hoping to persuade a New York appeals court to intervene, Mr. Trump’s lawyers plan to file a civil action against Justice Merchan and seek to freeze the sentencing, according to the filing. It is unclear when they will file that action with the appellate court, but it could come as soon as Monday.Even though Justice Merchan has signaled that he will spare the former and future president any substantive punishment, Mr. Trump is scrambling to avoid the symbolic blow of sentencing. Once Mr. Trump is sentenced for the 34-count conviction, he will formally become a felon.In the filing to Justice Merchan unsealed on Monday, Mr. Trump’s lawyers argued that the sentencing would also become a distraction from his presidential duties.“This court’s decision to schedule a sentencing hearing on Jan. 10, 2025, at the apex of presidential transition and 10 days before President Trump assumes office, necessitates that President Trump will be forced to continue to defend his criminal case while he is in office,” his lawyers, Todd Blanche and Emil Bove, wrote.In the same filing, Mr. Trump’s lawyers indicated that they also planned to challenge Justice Merchan’s decision last month to uphold the conviction. In preserving a jury’s verdict from May, the judge rejected Mr. Trump’s argument that a recent Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity had nullified his conviction for falsifying business records to cover up a sex scandal.Mr. Trump’s lawyers said they planned to both appeal Justice Merchan’s rulings and file an action against him as a so-called Article 78 petition, a special proceeding used to challenge decisions made by New York State agencies and judges. In essence, the president-elect would bring a civil case against the judge to unwind his recent decisions to uphold the conviction and schedule the sentencing.The appellate court could act fast. An appellate judge could rule on the petitions as soon as Monday, deciding either to grant or deny an interim stay of the sentencing. While ordinarily that judge’s ruling would only be temporary — a full panel of appellate judges is supposed to evaluate Mr. Trump’s claims in the coming weeks — the case against the president-elect is running out of time.Once Mr. Trump is sworn in on Jan. 20, the proceedings might grind to a halt, potentially making any additional rulings moot. Under a longstanding Justice Department policy, sitting presidents cannot face federal prosecution, and although the New York case was brought in state court, not federal, it will most likely follow that precedent.A spokeswoman for the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which prosecuted Mr. Trump, said that the office would respond to Mr. Trump’s filing on Monday afternoon. It is unclear whether Justice Merchan will then rule by 2 p.m., and if not, whether Mr. Trump will push ahead with his appellate court filings.In a statement, a spokesman for Mr. Trump declared that his legal team was moving “to stop the unlawful sentencing in the Manhattan D.A.’s Witch Hunt.” The spokesman, Steven Cheung, added that: “The Supreme Court’s historic decision on Immunity, the state constitution of New York, and other established legal precedent mandate that this meritless hoax be immediately dismissed.”Attacking judges, particularly Justice Merchan, is a key page from Mr. Trump’s legal playbook. And so is delay.Mr. Trump, after being indicted four times in four different jurisdictions, used a mixture of appeals and court filings to manufacture one delay after another in each of the cases. The effort, while scattershot, effectively ran out the clock.The federal special counsel who brought two of those cases — one in Washington, D.C., and the other in Florida — recently shut them down, bowing to a Justice Department policy prohibiting federal prosecutions of sitting presidents. And in Georgia, where Mr. Trump is accused of trying to subvert the state’s 2020 election results, an appeals court disqualified the local prosecutor who brought the case, delaying it indefinitely.In New York, Justice Merchan had already postponed the sentencing several times. He initially delayed it to consider Mr. Trump’s effort to have the conviction thrown out based on the recent Supreme Court decision granting presidents broad immunity for their official actions. The judge, who rejected that effort in a Dec. 16 ruling, also postponed the sentencing to accommodate Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign.In the wake of his electoral victory, Mr. Trump again asked the judge to dismiss the case, arguing that a president-elect could not face prosecution.Last week, Justice Merchan denied that bid as well — and tried to put a stop to the delays. He wrote in an 18-page ruling that throwing out the jury’s verdict “would undermine the rule of law in immeasurable ways,” and that “the sanctity of a jury verdict” was “a bedrock principle in our nation’s jurisprudence.”The judge’s ruling infuriated Mr. Trump. In a series of posts on social media, he slammed Justice Merchan, a moderate Democrat and former prosecutor, and claimed that the judge was a “radical partisan.”And yet, in that same ruling, Justice Merchan disclosed that he planned to spare Mr. Trump any jail time. Instead, the judge signaled that he favored a so-called unconditional discharge of Mr. Trump’s sentence, a rare and lenient alternative to jail or probation.That sentence, the judge wrote, “appears to be the most viable solution,” nodding to the legal and practical impossibility of jailing a sitting president.Some legal experts suggested Mr. Trump might not fight the sentencing now that his freedom was no longer at stake; once sentenced, he is free to appeal his conviction.But ever since his conviction in May, Mr. Trump has insisted that he should not face sentencing. He has also tried to move the case to federal court, where an appeals court is still considering his request.If the New York appeals court denies his request for an emergency stay, Mr. Trump has other options at his disposal, including asking the federal appeals court to intervene. He could also file a flurry of new litigation in federal court in hopes of rushing to the Supreme Court.It is unclear whether the Supreme Court would get involved in the case.The high court intervened in one of Mr. Trump’s federal criminal cases, issuing its landmark ruling granting presidents broad immunity for their official actions. But the New York case involves a personal and political crisis that predated Mr. Trump’s presidency, centering on a hush-money payment to a porn star during Mr. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.Michael D. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s fixer at the time, struck the deal with the porn star, Stormy Daniels, in the final days of the 2016 campaign, when she was threatening to go public with her account of a sexual encounter with Mr. Trump.Mr. Trump, the jury concluded, then covered up his reimbursement of Mr. Cohen through payments falsely classified as ordinary legal expenses.
