Donald Trump has been re-elected US president as a convicted felon awaiting sentencing in the New York hush money case and still working to avoid prosecution in other cases.
It's a remarkably unique position for him: Never before has a defendant been elected to the nation's highest office, just as a former president had never been impeached until last year, CNN reported.
Trump has said several times that he plans to fire the special counsel, Jack Smith, and drop federal cases against him for trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election and mishandling classified documents.
A judge in New York will hand down the former president's sentence later this month, after he postponed it to avoid any influence on the outcome of the presidential race. However, Trump's lawyers are expected to ask the judge to postpone the sentence again now that he is president-elect.
Trump has pleaded not guilty to all charges.
Trump is scheduled to appear in court in New York on November 26 to be sentenced on 34 counts of falsifying business records to illegally influence the 2016 presidential election through hush payments to a porn actress who had said that he had sexual intercourse with her.
It is not yet known whether the sentencing hearing will be held.
Judge Juan Merchan has given himself until November 12 to decide whether to erase the sentence due to the Supreme Court's decision granting immunity to the president. If Merchan does, the charges would be dismissed and Trump would not be convicted.
But if the judge decides to go ahead with the sentence, lawyers will ask for it to be delayed so they can appeal. If that is not granted, lawyers plan to appeal the immunity ruling in state appeals courts, potentially all the way to the US Supreme Court to seek a stay of Trump's sentence until all appeals are exhausted, which could take months.
If he goes forward with the sentence, Trump could be ordered to serve up to four years in prison, but the judge is not required to sentence the president-elect to prison, so he could impose a lesser sentence, such as probation, time served community or fine.
Either decision would be complicated by the fact that Trump will take office on January 20. Trump's lawyers are likely to appeal the court's rulings, with the case lingering in the courts for years.
Trump's victory is expected to have the biggest impact on the two federal criminal cases brought against him by Smith in Washington and Florida. After the cases were filed in 2023, the main strategy of Trump's lawyers has been to delay the trials until after the election, so that if elected he would fire Smith, which then leads to the conclusion of both cases.
Smith's firing would allow the Justice Department and attorney general to move toward dropping the charges against him and ending the court cases.
But until Inauguration Day, Smith has time to weigh his options on issues the department has never faced.
One difficulty is whether the Justice Department considers a president-elect to be protected by the same legal protections against prosecution as a sitting president.
In the case filed in Washington, Smith accused Trump of trying to overturn the 2020 election results. The charges filed in Florida allege that Trump illegally obtained classified documents from the White House and resisted government efforts to retrieve those documents.
And the fate of Trump's criminal case in Georgia hinges on whether Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is disqualified from prosecuting because of her past romantic relationships with a fellow prosecutor.
Civil lawsuits
The president-elect is also defending himself in a series of civil lawsuits, including those related to his role in the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, two defamation lawsuits by E. Jean Carroll and a civil fraud lawsuit filed by the New York attorney general where Trump was ordered to pay nearly $454 million in restitution.
Trump lost two fraud cases against Carroll in 2023 and 2024 in federal court after a jury found him liable for sexually abusing the columnist and defaming her. Carroll was awarded $5 million and $83 million.
Trump appealed the first ruling on Carroll, but the appeals court has yet to issue a decision.
Trump is also facing civil lawsuits filed by Democratic lawmakers and others over his role in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
It is possible that all these cases will continue to develop even as Trump begins his second term in the White House. In a 1997 Supreme Court ruling stemming from a civil lawsuit involving then-President Bill Clinton, the justices unanimously ruled that sitting presidents could not invoke presidential immunity to avoid civil lawsuits while in office. on duty.
