NEW YORK — President-elect Donald Trump will become the first felon in the White House after a New York judge on Friday denied his request to throw out the guilty verdicts in his criminal hush money case and ordered him to appear for his sentencing next week.

State Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan, who presided over Trump’s criminal trial in Manhattan last year, rejected the incoming president’s motion to dismiss the hush money indictment and vacate the jury’s guilty verdicts. He said Trump must appear for his sentencing on Friday, Jan. 10, at 9:30 a.m., at lower Manhattan’s 100 Centre St. in person or virtually.

Last month, Merchan denied requests Trump filed before the election to throw out the verdicts and dismiss the underlying indictment based on the U.S. Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity, which came down after he was found guilty and granted presidents broad immunity from criminal prosecution for “official acts.”

Trump had argued the ruling meant prosecutors were prohibited from showing evidence related to his time in office, including testimony from White House staffers, like his former communications director Hope Hicks, and threatening posts on his presidential social media account directed at Michael Cohen, his former fixer. The judge agreed with the position of the Manhattan district attorney’s office that the evidence in question concerned “entirely unofficial conduct.”

“It is ... logical and reasonable to conclude that if the act of falsifying records to cover up the payments so that the public would not be made aware is decidedly an unofficial act, so too should the communications to further that same cover-up be unofficial,” Merchan wrote on Dec. 16.

The judge concluded, “if error occurred regarding the introduction of the challenged evidence, such error was harmless in light of the overwhelming evidence of guilt.”

A jury found Trump guilty of 34 felony counts of falsification of business records on May 30 relating to his reimbursement to Cohen for paying off Stormy Daniels in the lead-up to the 2016 election, classifying him the first U.S. president to be found guilty of breaking the law.

Prosecutors at trial argued that Cohen’s $130,000 payment to Daniels purchased her silence about a sordid sexual encounter she’s long alleged she had with Trump at a 2006 golf tournament when the porn actress and producer was 27 and he was 60. Trial evidence showed it was one made in a scheme to suppress unflattering information about his past from voters in 2016 that also included payoffs to former Playboy model Karen McDougal, who alleges she had a nearly yearlong affair with Trump, and a doorman at Trump Tower who claimed Trump had fathered a child with a housekeeper out of wedlock.

The criminal case was the only one of four brought against Trump after his first term that made it before a jury. After his election victory, the Department of Justice moved to end the federal cases accusing him of plotting to overthrow President Joe Biden’s win in 2020 and hoarding highly sensitive classified documents impacting national security after leaving office and poorly storing them at his country clubs.

He’s not expected to face trial on criminal charges in Georgia in a heavily backlogged case anytime soon.

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