President-elect Donald Trump on Wednesday urged the US Supreme Court to pause his sentencing in the hush money case, a highly unusual request that relies in part on the court’s decision last year to grant him broad immunity from criminal prosecution.

Trump’s emergency appeal arrived a day after a state appeals court in New York rejected his request to postpone his sentencing, which is set for Friday.

The pause is required, Trump’s attorneys told the court, “to prevent grave injustice and harm to the institution of the presidency and the operations of the federal government.”

In response to Trump’s filing, a spokesperson for Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said, “We will respond in court papers.”

The high court has asked prosecutors respond by 10 a.m. ET on Thursday.

The president-elect is appealing his conviction on 34 counts of falsifying business records, arguing it should be tossed because a conservative majority of the Supreme Court in July ruled that former presidents are entitled to sweeping immunity for official actions.

Trump’s latest request to the US Supreme Court is unusual – and likely an uphill fight – because his criminal case isn’t yet fully resolved by New York courts. Judge Juan Merchan, the trial judge in New York, has rejected Trump’s demands to stop the Friday sentencing.

Merchan has signaled that Trump, who will be inaugurated on January 20, will face no legal penalties.

Trump was convicted in May of falsifying business records over payments to his then-lawyer Michael Cohen to reimburse a $130,000 hush money payment made to adult-film star Stormy Daniels, in order to keep her from speaking out about an alleged affair before the 2016 election. Trump has denied the affair.

Merchan upheld Trump’s conviction last week.

Earlier Tuesday, a New York appellate judge swiftly rejected Trump’s postponement request following a brief hearing.

Trump’s attorney Todd Blanche, whom he’s picked to serve as a top Justice Department official in his incoming administration, argued during the hearing that the court should stop the sentencing, while acknowledging the situation was unprecedented. Though Merchan has denied two arguments to vacate Trump’s conviction, Blanche argued that either of them should allow for a stay of proceedings while the appeal is litigated.

The Manhattan district attorney’s office, meanwhile, argued Trump’s team has not put forward any argument that a one-hour sentencing hearing would disrupt Trump’s responsibilities as president-elect.

If Trump’s lawyers are successful in halting the proceedings before he is sworn-in in fewer than two weeks, the hush money case could linger for months while his attorneys pursue an appeal to toss out the conviction.

Trump is relying heavily on the Supreme Court’s controversial immunity decision from last year in a new filing Wednesday in which he is asking the high court to pause delay his sentencing.

He is also arguing that continuing to defend himself in the hush money case would distract from the transition and potentially jeopardize national security.

“Defending criminal litigation at all stages – especially, as here, defending a criminal sentencing – is uniquely taxing and burdensome to a criminal defendant,” Trump’s lawyers told the high court.

“President Trump is currently engaged in the most crucial and sensitive tasks of preparing to assume the executive power in less than two weeks, all of which are essential to the United States’ national security and vital interests,” they wrote.

Merchan had previously rejected Trump’s arguments around immunity, concluding that Trump’s hush money case involved unofficial conduct that is not entitled to protection.

“That decision, among many others made by the trial court, was made in error and, if allowed to stand, would gravely undermine the American Presidency as we know it,” Trump told the US Supreme Court in his emergency appeal.

Trump also asked the Supreme Court on Wednesday for an administrative pause on the lower court’s proceedings. If the Supreme Court accepts that idea, it would give the justices a few days to review legal briefs in the case before deciding on Trump’s underlying request.

Ryanair, Europe’s biggest airline, is going after unruly passengers on its flights and has filed for €15,000 ($15,400) in damages from a passenger who disrupted a flight last year.

The Ireland-based budget airline announced Wednesday that it has filed legal proceedings against the passenger, who, it said, disrupted a flight from Dublin to Lanzarote in Spain in April of last year.

“This passenger’s inexcusable behaviour forced this flight to divert to Porto where it was delayed overnight, causing 160 passengers to face unnecessary disruption,” the airline said in a statement published online.

The carrier said it has filed a case in the Irish Circuit Court seeking to recover the costs of the delay, which included overnight accommodation, passenger expenses, and landing costs.

There have been several reports of disruptive behavior on Ryanair flights in recent years.

In November, the UK’s Independent newspaper reported that a Ryanair flight was forced to alert authorities before landing in Tenerife, Spain after several passengers became disruptive and one person urinated in the aisle.

A passenger who disrupted a Ryanair flight to Athens in 2020 was convicted last month in a Greek court and given a five-month suspended jail sentence, along with a €400 ($412) fine.

“This demonstrates just one of the many consequences that passengers who disrupt flights will face as part of Ryanair’s zero tolerance policy,” a spokesperson for the airline said in a statement.

“We plan to pursue civil action against disruptive passengers as a move towards eliminating disruptive passenger behaviour,” the spokesperson added.

Four years ago, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg banned Donald Trump from Facebook and Instagram, saying the risks of allowing him on the platforms were “simply too great” after Trump repeatedly used the sites to broadcast election lies and cheer on the January 6 mob.

A lot’s changed.

Now, Zuckerberg is making it crystal clear that Meta and MAGA can get along.

The social media giant is canning its fact-checkers and making its platforms look a little more like X, the site owned by “first buddy” Elon Musk. At the same time, Meta named Trump ally and UFC boss Dana White to its board of directors on Monday, days after elevating Joel Kaplan, the most prominent Republican lobbyist for the company, to be its new head of global affairs. Meta was one of several large tech companies to donate $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund. And Zuckerberg — whom Trump once threatened with life in prison — has personally made the pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to dine with the incoming president since the election.

While Zuckerberg is clearly trying to insulate Meta from Trump’s looming corporate retribution tour, he’s also courting a potential disaster if Meta’s advertisers flee and users begin to associate the brand — already tarnished by AI slop and a yearslong dearth of innovation — with the kinds of unsavory characters who now dominate X.

On Tuesday morning, Zuckerberg tapped the president-elect’s favorite TV channel, Fox News, to announce that the world’s dominant social media platforms are now, for all intents and purposes, pro-Trump.

Meta is getting rid of its third-party fact-checkers, Zuckerberg said, because they have been “too politically biased,” made too many mistakes “and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created” — unfalsifiable statements that echo the right’s longtime claim that Facebook censors conservative views. Meta will replace fact-checkers with “community notes” similar to those on X, in which users can add comments to posts that may contain false information.

The hits kept coming on Tuesday, as my colleague Clare Duffy reported that Meta quietly updated its guidelines to free users who want to refer to gay and transgender people as having a “mental illness,” or refer to women as “household objects” and “property.”

All of this buys Meta some insurance going into an era of Trump 2.0. As business leaders remember all too well from Round One, Trump has shown little restraint when he senses companies are being insufficiently loyal. Meta’s own stock tumbled in March after Trump called in to CNBC to label Facebook an “enemy of the people.”

CNN One Thing The Case For (And Against) Banning TikTok

The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear oral arguments on Friday in a case that could decide whether a ban on TikTok is allowed to go into effect later this month. We break down the arguments on both sides and whether President-elect Donald Trump has any power to save the platform – years after trying to ban it himself.Guest: Clare Duffy, CNN Business Reporter

Jan 08, 2025 • 27 min

If Meta were to take the harder line it invoked four years ago, it could expect to find itself in Trump’s crosshairs on social media and shut out of the rooms where rivals like Musk are making decisions about tech’s future.

But Meta’s repositioning is hardly a foolproof business plan. Just take a look at X, the site Musk acquired in 2022 when it was called Twitter. Musk remade the site in his own image, reinstating White nationalists and other offensive accounts that had been banned under Twitter’s safety guidelines. Advertisers, wary of their products appearing alongside hate speech, rushed to the exits. Millions of users, similarly unhappy about the return of neo-Nazis on the platform, also left for competitors like Bluesky and Meta’s Threads.

X’s value has cratered 80% since Musk bought it, according to estimates from investment giant Fidelity.

That’s not a huge problem for X and Musk, who could theoretically bankroll the entire operation himself.

The same can’t be said for Meta, one of the world’s most valuable public companies, with a market cap of $1.5 trillion.

“Brand safety remains a key factor in determining where advertisers spend their budgets,” Emarketer principal analyst Jasmine Enberg said in an email Tuesday. “Social media is already a minefield for content that many brands deem unsafe, and Meta’s change could exacerbate those problems.”

Even a slight dropoff in engagement could hurt the business, Enberg said.

We’ve seen it before.

In 2022, Meta lost nearly $240 billion in market value in a single day — the biggest one-day drop in company value in the history of the US stock market at the time — after it reported a slight decline in daily active Facebook users and an 8% drop in quarterly profit.

That hits Zuckerberg where he lives, because he’s the biggest individual shareholder, says Cory Doctorow, a journalist, author and activist with the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation. But more importantly, stock swings hit the rich-but-not-billionaire-rich class of Meta executives.

“Zuckerberg is insulated from the consequences of making bad choices until he’s not — until things reach a breaking point… and then he tends to panic,” Doctorow told me. “Tech calls these panics ‘pivots,’ but they’re just the outcome of being the CEO of a company that posts anemic growth or even a contraction and sees the Street just go nuts on you.”

Past “pivots” have included the Metaverse, the sci-fi nonsense that Zuckerberg pitched as the future of the company three years ago. More recently, Meta is testing out its own AI-generated “users” in an apparent ploy to goose engagement.

“They’re now at the end of a long run of extremely bad choices,” Doctorow said. Which is not to say Meta is doomed, per se. “But I think that they are on the path to becoming a kind of zombie — like MySpace is today. MySpace still exists. It’s just AI-generated slop and spam.”