Days away from his criminal sentencing in New York, President-elect Donald J. Trump is seeking a late-stage rescue from the U.S. Supreme Court, escalating his bid to shut down the case before he returns to the White House.
In an emergency application filed late Tuesday, Mr. Trump’s lawyers urged the justices to intervene and halt the sentencing, which is scheduled for Friday, 10 days before the presidential inauguration.
The filing came after a New York appeals court rejected the same request on Tuesday, casting doubt on the validity of his effort to stave off the sentencing.
The effort hinges on Mr. Trump’s argument that he is entitled to full immunity from prosecution, and even sentencing, now that he is the president-elect. His lawyers have based that claim on a polarizing Supreme Court ruling from last year that granted former presidents broad immunity for their official acts.
“This court should enter an immediate stay of further proceedings in the New York trial court,” the application said, “to prevent grave injustice and harm to the institution of the presidency and the operations of the federal government.”
The Supreme Court directed prosecutors to respond to Mr. Trump’s application by Thursday morning, an indication that the justices may act before the scheduled sentencing on Friday. A spokeswoman for the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which prosecuted Mr. Trump, declined to comment, saying only that the office would respond in court papers.
The filing capped a whirlwind stretch of legal wrangling for the former and future president, who is scrambling to avoid the embarrassing spectacle of a public sentencing.
Although Mr. Trump is expected to receive nothing more than a slap on the wrist — the trial judge overseeing the case has signaled that he would spare Mr. Trump jail time — the sentencing carries symbolic importance. It would formalize Mr. Trump’s status as a felon, making him the first president to hold that dubious designation.
Mr. Trump’s lawyers argued in the Supreme Court filing that being officially deemed a felon might complicate Mr. Trump’s presidential duties.
“In fact, the prospect of imposing sentence on President Trump just before he assumes office as the 47th president raises the specter of other possible restrictions on liberty, such as travel, reporting requirements, registration, probationary requirements, and others — all of which would be constitutionally intolerable under the doctrine of presidential immunity,” Mr. Trump’s lawyers wrote.
“Indeed, every adjudication of a felony conviction results in significant collateral consequences for the defendant, regardless of whether a term of imprisonment is imposed.”
The filing noted that Mr. Trump had also asked New York’s highest court, its Court of Appeals, for an emergency stay, acknowledging that litigants must ordinarily seek relief from lower courts before turning to the Supreme Court.
“Because it is highly questionable whether the New York Court of Appeals will act in the next 48 hours, filing applications in both courts appears to be the only viable option,” it said.
If the Supreme Court grants a stay of Mr. Trump’s sentencing, it might effectively scuttle the proceeding for good. The window to sentence Mr. Trump is rapidly closing — once he returns to the White House, Mr. Trump cannot face criminal prosecution — and he would be 82 after his second term concludes. It is unclear whether the trial judge overseeing the case would still seek to impose Mr. Trump’s sentence four years later.
For now, Mr. Trump’s odds of success at the Supreme Court are unclear. While some legal experts doubted the merits of his application, the justices have come to his rescue before. The Supreme Court’s immunity ruling in July effectively thwarted a federal criminal case against Mr. Trump for his effort to subvert the 2020 election results.
And even though other courts have grown hostile to Mr. Trump’s arguments in the New York case, he might find a friendlier reception at the Supreme Court, where the 6-to-3 conservative majority includes three justices he appointed during his first term.
It takes five justices to grant a stay.
The Supreme Court might be Mr. Trump’s final stop. If the court declines to grant his request for a stay, he is almost certain to face sentencing on Friday.
Mr. Trump’s application was filed by two of his picks for top jobs in the Justice Department: Todd Blanche, set to be named deputy attorney general, and D. John Sauer, Mr. Trump’s choice for solicitor general.
In May, a New York jury found Mr. Trump guilty on 34 felony counts of falsifying records to cover up a sex scandal. Ever since, he has sought to unravel the verdict or at least postpone the sentencing, an effort that gained momentum in the wake of the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling.
Yet the trial judge overseeing the case, Juan M. Merchan, recently rejected Mr. Trump’s bid to throw out the case based on that ruling. The judge concluded that because the ruling concerned a president’s “official acts,” it did not apply to the New York case, which centered on the “decidedly personal acts of falsifying business records.”
Even Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who wrote the majority opinion, held that not every act a president takes is official, Justice Merchan noted.
Mr. Trump this week filed a civil action against Justice Merchan to unwind his ruling, and asked the state appellate court to pause his sentencing in the meantime.
But at a hearing on Tuesday, a lawyer for the Manhattan district attorney’s office emphasized that the case centered on “unofficial conduct,” a sex scandal that simmered before his presidency. Mr. Trump’s claim of immunity, the lawyer said, was “baseless.”
Ellen Gesmer, the New York appellate court judge assigned to hear the emergency request, was similarly dubious of Mr. Trump’s claim. At the hearing Tuesday, Justice Gesmer was immediately skeptical of Mr. Trump’s arguments, grilling his lawyer about whether he had “any support for a notion that presidential immunity extends to president-elects?”
The lawyer, Todd Blanche, conceded that he did not, saying, “There has never been a case like this before.”
Justice Gesmer also highlighted that Mr. Trump was no longer facing jail time, suggesting that he would not suffer much harm from the sentencing. In a recent ruling, Justice Merchan suggested that he would impose an unconditional discharge of Mr. Trump’s sentence, a rare and lenient alternative to jail or probation.
Although Mr. Trump faces up to four years in prison, Justice Merchan’s plan reflected the practical impossibility of jailing a sitting president.
In ordinary felony cases that involve falsifying business records, defendants often spend time behind bars. But nothing about Mr. Trump’s case was ordinary.
It stems from a hush-money payment made in 2016 to a porn star, Stormy Daniels, who at the time was threatening to go public with her story of a sexual encounter with Mr. Trump.
Rather than risk a scandal during his presidential campaign that year, Mr. Trump directed his fixer at the time, Michael D. Cohen, to pay Ms. Daniels $130,000.
When Mr. Trump reimbursed Mr. Cohen, the jury at his trial concluded, he concocted a plan to cover up the deal with a series of false records.
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