Former Manhattan DA Says Trump Likely Will Get No Prison Time

A former Manhattan district attorney predicted that former President Donald Trump likely will receive no prison time after his conviction.

Cyrus Vance Jr., a Democrat who retired in 2022, was asked by NBC News on Sunday in a “Meet the Press” interview about a possible prison term.

“I think not,” he replied.

“The president has made this a little more complicated by having been found in contempt 10 times during the court, but I think that with the proximity of the Republican convention four days after his sentencing, and then if he is the candidate for the Republican Party the proximity of the election, I would be surprised that he would be sentenced to any imprisonment,” Mr. Vance said.

Mr. Vance then noted: “Now, that said, the court could adjourn sentencing until after the general election and then essentially decide then.”

The former president was convicted of 34 counts of falsifying business records after a roughly six-week trial. New York State Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan, who is overseeing the case, ordered a sentencing date for July 11, four days before the Republican National Convention.

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In his interview, Mr. Vance said that he investigated President Trump but ultimately didn’t prosecute him.

“Well, we did investigate the former president on a range of issues. I ultimately believed that our investigation was best focused on financial crimes,” he said. “I’m confident that we made the right choice for us at that time in pursuing the financial crimes investigation. As you know, it resulted in convictions.”

Appeal Expected

The former president and his attorneys have signaled they will appeal the conviction, while President Trump wrote on Truth Social on Sunday that the U.S. Supreme Court should intervene before the July sentencing date.

Based on Mr. Scharf’s comments, it’s likely that in their appeal, President Trump’s lawyers will target jury instructions that were given by Justice Merchan last week.

“I think when you look at the jury instructions here, Judge Merchan essentially … certainly steered the jury toward the verdict that he clearly wanted,” Mr. Scharf said in the interview. “Some of Judge Merchan’s evidentiary decisions really throughout the conduct of this trial were, frankly, astounding,” Mr. Scharf stated.

His team would challenge Justice Merchan’s decision not to recuse himself in the case during the onset of the trial in mid-April. Later, in May, a New York appeals court denied President Trump’s bid for his recusal.

Justice Merchan in April said that the former president’s attorneys “failed to provide” evidence regarding a conflict of interest. “There is no agenda here,” he said at the time before rejecting President Trump’s recusal motion. “We want to follow the law.”

District Attorney Alvin Bragg, a Democrat who brought the case, has not indicated whether he will pursue a prison sentence for President Trump.

In the case, prosecutors alleged that payments made to adult film actress Stormy Daniels were part of a broader scheme in violation of campaign finance and tax laws to pay off people with potentially negative information about President Trump during the 2016 election.

The maximum sentence for falsification of business records is four years imprisonment. Some legal analysts have said that it’s rare for people without any criminal past such as President Trump to face prison time for being convicted of falsification of business records in New York.

Defendants convicted of falsifying business records who get sentenced to time behind bars typically serve a year or less, and even in those cases most were convicted of other crimes such as fraud or grand larceny—unlike President Trump.

If punished beyond a fine, the former president could be placed under home confinement or subject to a curfew rather than imprisoned. As a former president, he has a lifetime Secret Service detail, and the logistics of keeping him safe behind bars could become complicated.

A spokesperson for the U.S. Secret Service on Friday told The Epoch Times that the agency’s mission to protect current and former presidents has not changed in light of the conviction.

The trial’s “outcome has no bearing on the manner in which the United States Secret Service carries out its protective mission,” the agency said, before adding that “our security measures will proceed unchanged.”

Reuters contributed to this report.