Donald Trump made history earlier this year by becoming the first US president ever convicted of a crime.
Earlier this year, a jury found the former president guilty on all 34 counts of falsifying business records in connection to a hush money payment to a porn star.
Stormy Daniels alleged that she had an affair with Trump in 2006, something the former president has denied outright. Even so, shortly before the 2016 presidential election, Daniels received a $130,000 payment from Trump’s then-fixer-turned-foe Michael Cohen.
Cohen was later reimbursed for the payment — reimbursements that were fraudulently logged as legal expenses.
A jury of 12 New Yorkers has found that Trump falsified those business records as part of a plot to interfere with the election by hiding negative information about himself from voters.
“This was a rigged, disgraceful trial,” Trump raged outside the courtroom at the time. “The real verdict is going to be November 5 by the people, and they know what happened here,” he added, referencing the 2024 presidential election.
“I’m a very innocent man,” he said.
It turns out that Trump was right – and on November 5 the American people decided his conviction wasn’t enough to bar him from office and instead gave him a second key to the White House.
However, Trump is currently still set to be sentenced on November 26.
So now it comes down to this: a convicted felon has become the next president of the US, and could even wind up running the country from prison.
But can Trump pardon himself?
From a legal standpoint, when he becomes president, Trump could pardon himself for any federal convictions.
But he could not pardon himself for any convictions on the state level, such as his conviction in New York.
“The state and federal systems in the United States are completely separate,” Steve Duffy, a jury consultant at Trial Behavior Consulting, told The Independent prior to the verdict.
