President-elect Donald Trumpunloaded on Judge Juan Merchan, who donated to President Joe Biden, Friday evening for denying his request to dismiss the highly controversial hush money case in which he was convicted last year in Manhattan.
Merchan ordered Trump to appear for sentencing “in person or virtually” on January 10, 2025, at 9:30 a.m. — just 10 days before he is sworn in as president — but indicated that he would not be incarcerated.
“While this Court as a matter of law must not make any determination on sentencing prior to giving the parties and Defendants opportunity to be heard, it seems proper at this juncture to make known the Court’s inclination to not impose any sentence of incarceration, a sentence authorized by the conviction but one the People concede they no longer view as a practicable recommendation,” Merchan wrote in his ruling.
Trump fired back at the ruling during an interview, saying that “every major legal pundit, including Andy McCarthy, Jonathan Turley, Gregg Jarrett, and Eli Honig, has stated strongly there was no case, there is no case and this was just a witch hunt.”
“The judge is corrupt and I am still under a gag order, I am not allowed to speak about the thing he least wants me to talk about,” Trump continued, adding that Merchan was “a totally conflicted judge who is doing the work for the Democrat Party because every other case has failed.”
Trump said that he did “absolutely nothing wrong” in the case, which even many Democrats criticized for the highly controversial legal theory that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg applied in the case to prosecute Trump.
“This is a political witch hunt by Biden and the DOJ,” Trump said. “They want to see if they can get a pound of flesh because every case has failed including deranged Jack Smith’s, who is on his way back to the Hague after having lost every case.”
He added that Merchan was “the most conflicted judge in the history of jurisprudence.”
“There has never been a judge as conflicted as this one,” Trump said. “There was no case. He created a case out of nothing because he wanted my political opponent to win.”
