Donald Trump sentenced to unconditional discharge in New York for the Stormy Daniels case

Donald Trump is now, officially,the first US president to be criminally convicted. This Friday, a Manhattan court sentenced Trump to unconditional discharge after he was found guilty in May last year for the Stormy Daniels case.

The unconditional discharge is an extraordinary and legal measure that Judge Merchan has resorted to in order to avoid any penalty of fine, probation or prison for Trump. This figure, however, maintains the convicted person's guilt.

Judge Juan Merchán assured that "the legal protections afforded to the office of the chief executive is a factor that prevails over all others." However, "they do not reduce the seriousness of the crime nor do they justify in any way its commission," the judge said in his ruling.

Trump, who appeared telematically by video call, again insisted on his innocence and denounced "a witch hunt" against him.

Consolation prize for Merchán and Bragg

Although they failed to derail the Republican's candidacy or prevent his electoral victory, Judge Juan Merchán and District Attorney Alvin Bragg got the consolation prize in the Stormy Daniels case by getting the sentence made public before the conservative mogul was sworn into office on Jan. 20.

The reading of the sentence came with suspense, after Trump's defense exhausted all possibilities of appeal before all competent courts until reaching the Supreme Court.

The "no" of five of the nine SCOTUS justices last Thursday, a day before the time set by Merchan to publish the ruling, closed the president-elect's hopes.

Accusations of partisanship and corruption against Judge Merchan.

Among multiple and aggressive messages on Trump's social networks against the judge, whom he accused of creating -together with Bragg-, a nonexistent case against him to help the Democratic Party, and of being contaminated by the professional ties of his daughter with the blue formation, the team of the president-elect tried to convince Merchán himself on repeated occasions not to go ahead, something that the magistrate declined on each of them.

In fact, in his final brief, Merchán noted that he was rejecting the counsel's motion because "this Court has examined the defendant's arguments in support of its motion and finds that they are, for the most part,a repetition of arguments it has raised numerous times in the past."

A path of failed appeals to Pyrrhic victory for Merchan and Bragg.

The most that Trump's lawyers got was the postponement of the publication of the judgment until after the elections, which Merchán finally set for before the inauguration, avoiding the case dying upon the Republican's inauguration as president. With the date chosen, the magistrate guaranteed that Trump will be the first president convicted on criminal charges in history.

Immediately after that door closed, Trump's defense urgently appealed to the appeals court, but the judge Ellen Gesmer dismissed it and ordered the process to continue. The same fate befell the appeal to the Supreme Court in the Empire State, the last step before the Supreme Court also gave the green light to read the sentence.