New York Judge Juan Merchan weighs dismissing case against Trump as sentencing date nears

Judge Juan Merchan, the New York City judge overseeing the falsified business records case brought forth by District Attorney Alvin Bragg against Donald Trump, has reportedly set a deadline for whether to toss out the case due to presidential immunity. The deadline will be ahead of Trump’s scheduled November 26 sentencing.

CNN chief legal correspondent Paula Reid said Wednesday that Merchan is "giving himself a deadline of November 12th to decide if the conviction against Trump should be tossed based on the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on immunity."

"If he tosses the conviction, there’ll be no sentencing. But if that sentencing continues to go forward, this is the argument that the Trump team is going to make," she added.

That argument, she said, is that "the sentencing should never happen because now that Trump is president-elect, they will say that he is entitled to the same constitutional protections as a sitting president and should be protected from state actors and in this case, state prosecutors."

This comes as the Department of Justice is weighing how to wind down the two federal cases against Trump. The January 6 case and the Mar-a-Lago documents cases have been deaded by special counsel Jack Smith, with the latter case being dismissed in July by Judge Aileen Cannon. Longstanding department police reportedly states that a sitting president can’t be prosecuted. The January 6 case has filing deadlines in November and December, and Smith has been attempting to appeal Mar-a-Lago case dismissal.

In May, a Manhattan jury found Trump guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records, which were raised to felony counts by Bragg, though they are usually tried as misdemeanors unless they are in service to a felony. Bragg never named that felony. Trump was originally set to be sentenced in the case in July, but the date was pushed off twice and finally to November. Following the Supreme Court’s ruling in July that a president has immunity for official acts undertaken while in office, Trump’s legal team has argued that the ruling in New York should be overturned because evidence used in the conviction, namely correspondence between himself and his aides as well as social media posts, were protected as "official acts."