Phill Kline, former Kansas Attorney General and current law professor at Liberty University School of Law, said he believes that the U.S. Supreme Court will grant President-elect Donald Trump’s emergency motion seeking to halt criminal sentencing scheduled for Friday morning in the New York hush-money case.
In May 2024, Trump was found guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records in the Stormy Daniels hush money case. Two months after the ruling, however, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Trump v. United States that Trump is immune from federal prosecution for official acts he took while in office.
Despite the Supreme Court’s ruling, the judge in the New York case, Juan Merchan, decided not to dismiss the case against Trump and instead delayed sentencing from November 26 to this Friday.
In a 40-page filing to the Supreme Court on Wednesday, the president-elect’s legal team is seeking an automatic stay of trial-court proceedings to allow Trump’s appeal pointing to presidential immunity to play out in the New York appellate courts and, as the filing notes, “if necessary” in the Supreme Court.
Kline said he believes the Supreme Court will grant Trump’s motion, explaining how the court in Trump v. United States recognized that “taking a sitting president and putting them under the color of potential prosecution, even in an investigation, can seriously harm the powers of the presidency unless that investigation is pursued consistent with articles of impeachment or other methods of redressing presidential grievances.”
“Just imagine if the president of the United States could be held into court by a local DA with manufactured charges at any point in his presidency. It is extraordinarily harmful to the powers of the presidency. So what the Supreme Court said is, look, anytime the presidential immunity claim is an issue, you’ve got to decide that issue prior to going to trial,” Kline explained on Wednesday’s edition of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show.
“I think the Supreme Court will grant [Trump’s motion]. I hope that they will grant it,” Kline added.
Despite Trump’s appeal being handled by liberal-leaning Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who handles emergency appeals from the Second Circuit, Kline said he remains confident that the president-elect’s motion will be granted.
“[Sotomayor] must decide that it’s likely that the Supreme Court will accept a writ, and I believe it’s pretty clear that it will. The Trump v. United States decision, although based on precedent, is unique factually in application, and therefore it has to be flushed out further to gain further understanding of what the Supreme Court viewed presidential immunity to be,” Kline explained.
“I think they’ll grant the stay,” Kline added.
Watch the full interview:
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
Photo “Donald Trump” by Gage Skidmore. CC BY-SA 2.0.
