Judge delays Trump hush money sentencing in order to decide where case should go next

A New York judge confirmed on Friday that US president elect Donald Trump will not be sentenced this month on 34 criminal counts in a hush money case that concluded this summer, instead setting a schedule for prosecutors and his lawyers to expand on their ideas about what to do next.

Amid a flurry of filings in the case since Trump won the presidential election on 5 November, it had become clear that the originally scheduled sentencing date of 26 November would not hold.

Judge Juan M. Merchan's order on Friday made that inevitability a formal reality, but stopped short of setting a new date.

Instead, Merchan called for further submissions from both sides over the next two-and-a-half weeks about how to proceed in light of Trump's impending reinauguration.

The constitutional implications of a president elect facing criminal convictions and sentencing before their inauguration are unclear, since the circumstances of the case against Trump are without precedent.

Trump's lawyers want the case to be dismissed outright, and immediately, saying it will otherwise interfere with his presidential duties.

Prosecutors have indicated that they're open to putting the case on hold, perhaps as long as Trump is in office, but that they don't want it to be scrapped altogether.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, a Democrat, has said the solution needs to balance the obligations of the presidency with "the sanctity of the jury verdict".

Trump spokesperson and incoming White House communications director Steven Cheung hailed Friday's ruling as "a decisive win" for Trump.

Trump was convicted in May of falsifying business records to disguise the true nature of a chain of payments that provided $130,000 to adult film actor Stormy Daniels. She received the payments via Trump's then-lawyer in the waning days of the 2016 presidential campaign — that is, before Trump became a public official.

The payout was meant to keep her quiet about a sexual encounter she says she had with the married Trump a decade earlier. Trump denies Daniels' claims, and says he did nothing wrong.