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President-elect Donald Trump was officially sentenced in his hush money trial Friday, and the Supreme Court considers arguments in a potential ban on TikTok.
President-elect Donald Trump on Friday received a no-penalty sentence known as an “unconditional discharge” in his New York hush money case, a rare decision for a felony conviction.
The sentence means Trump will serve no jail time or probation, and no fines will be imposed.
In court Friday, Judge Juan M. Merchan said he had determined an unconditional discharge was the only "lawful sentence."
Merchan previously indicated his decision came partly to avoid complicated constitutional issues that would arise if he imposed a penalty that overlapped with Trump’s presidency.
Merchan could have sentenced the 78-year-old Republican to up to four years in prison. Instead, he chose a sentence that sidestepped thorny constitutional issues by effectively ending the case but assured that Trump will become the first person convicted of a felony to assume the presidency.
Merchan said that like when facing any other defendant, he must consider any aggravating factors before imposing a sentence, but the legal protection that Trump will have as president “is a factor that overrides all others.”
“Despite the extraordinary breadth of those legal protections, one power they do not provide is that they do not erase a jury verdict," Merchan said.
Trump, briefly addressing the court as he appeared virtually from his Florida home, said his criminal trial and conviction has “been a very terrible experience” and insisted he committed no crime.
The Republican former president, appearing on a video feed 10 days before he is inaugurated, again pilloried the case, the only one of his four criminal indictments that has gone to trial and possibly the only one that ever will.
“It’s been a political witch hunt. It was done to damage my reputation so that I would lose the election, and obviously, that didn’t work," Trump said.
Trump called the case “a weaponization of government” and “an embarrassment to New York.”
President Joe Biden plans to deliver a capstone address Monday on his foreign policy legacy, according to the White House.
The outgoing president is expected to use his address at the State Department to highlight his administration’s efforts to expand NATO, rally dozens of allies to provide Ukraine with a steady stream of military aid to fight Russia, forge a historic agreement between Japan and South Korea to expand security and economic cooperation and more, according to a senior administration official who requested anonymity to preview plans for the address.
Biden also picked the State Department for his first major foreign policy speech at the start of his presidency nearly four years ago.
During that February 2021 address, Biden sought to send an unambiguous signal to the world that the United States was ready to resume its role as a global leader after four years in which President Donald Trump pressed an "America First" agenda.
But the one-term Democrat will bid farewell to U.S diplomats and make the case for his worldview as Trump prepares to return the White House with plans to drastically overhaul American foreign policy.
The president-elect has decried the cost of U.S. support for Ukraine’s war effort, called for NATO members to dramatically increase defense spending and said he would not rule out the use of military force to seize control of the Panama Canal and Greenland, as he insists U.S. control of both is vital to American national security.
The Supreme Court on Friday seemed likely to uphold a law that would ban TikTok in the United States beginning Jan. 19 unless the popular social media program is sold by its China-based parent company.
Hearing arguments in a momentous clash of free speech and national security concerns, the justices seemed persuaded by arguments that the national security threat posed by the company’s connections to China override concerns about restricting the speech, either of TikTok or its 170 million users in the United States.
Early in arguments that lasted more than two and a half hours, Chief Justice John Roberts identified as the "main concern" in the case TikTok’s ownership by China-based ByteDance and the parent company’s requirement to cooperate with the Chinese government’s intelligence operations.
If left in place, the law passed by bipartisan majorities in Congress and signed by President Joe Biden in April will require TikTok to "go dark" on Jan. 19, lawyer Noel Francisco told the justices on behalf of TikTok.
At the very least, Francisco urged, the justices should enter a temporary pause that would allow TikTok to keep operating.
"We might be in a different world again" after President-elect Donald Trump takes office on Jan. 20, he said.. Trump, who has 14.7 million followers on TikTok, also has called for the deadline to be pushed back to give him time to negotiate a "political resolution."
But it was not clear whether any justices would choose such a course. And only Justice Neil Gorsuch sounded like he would side with TikTok to find the ban violates the Constitution.
