DA suggests unusual idea for halting Trump’s hush money case while upholding his conviction

NEW YORK (AP) — Eager to preserve President-elect Donald Trump 's hush money conviction even as he returns to office, prosecutors are suggesting various ways forward — including one based on how some courts handle criminal cases when defendants die.

Trump's spokesperson called the ideas “pathetic.”

In court papers made public on Tuesday, the Manhattan district attorney's office proposed an array of options for keeping the historic conviction on the books.

The proposals include freezing the case until Trump is out of office, or agreeing that any future sentence wouldn't include jail time. Another idea: closing the case with a notation that acknowledges his conviction but says that he was never sentenced and that his appeal wasn't resolved because of presidential immunity.

The last is adopted from what some states do when a criminal defendant dies after being convicted but before appeals are exhausted. It is unclear whether that option is viable under New York law, but prosecutors suggested that Judge Juan M. Merchan could innovate in what's already a unique case.

“This remedy would prevent defendant from being burdened during his presidency by an ongoing criminal proceeding,” prosecutors wrote. But at the same time, it wouldn't “precipitously discard” the “meaningful fact that defendant was indicted and found guilty by a jury of his peers.”

Expanding on a position they laid out last month, prosecutors acknowledged that “presidential immunity requires accommodation during a president's time in office,” but they were adamant that the conviction should stand. They argued that Trump's impending return to the White House should not upend a jury's finding.

Trump is pressing for the case to be thrown out altogether in light of his election. His communications director, Steven Cheung, called prosecutors' filing “a pathetic attempt to salvage the remains of an unconstitutional and politically motivated hoax.”

“This lawless case should have never been brought, and the Constitution demands that it be immediately dismissed,” Cheung said in a statement.

Trump has been fighting for months to reverse his conviction on 34 counts of falsifying business records. Prosecutors said he fudged the documents to conceal a $130,000 payment to porn actor Stormy Daniels to suppress her claim that they had sex a decade earlier.

He says they did not and denies any wrongdoing.

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