Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg says Donald Trump’s imminent return to the presidency is not a reason to throw out the 34-count conviction that jurors delivered in the hush money case earlier this year.

Bragg conceded in a court filing that Trump cannot be sentenced while he is president. But he said Justice Juan Merchan has a variety of options to put the case on hold during Trump’s second term — and then issue a sentence after he leaves office in January 2029.

Bragg’s suggestion to keep the case on ice — rather than tossing out the conviction, as Trump is requesting — doubles down on a proposal that the prosecutor first floated in a letter to the judge last month.

Trump was found guilty in May of 34 felonies for falsifying business records related to a hush money scheme that covered up a potential sex scandal in the final days of the 2016 presidential campaign. The maximum sentence is four years in prison. Trump’s sentencing hearing has been repeatedly delayed, and now that he has won the 2024 election, Trump says any further proceedings would interfere with his presidential duties.

Bragg’s team urged Merchan to reject that “extreme” measure, pointing to the public interest in preserving jury verdicts.

“Even after the inauguration, defendant’s temporary immunity as the sitting President will still not justify the extreme remedy of discarding the jury’s unanimous guilty verdict and wiping out the already-completed phases of this criminal proceeding,” prosecutors wrote in an 81-page legal brief made public Tuesday. “Dismissing an indictment after a trial and guilty verdict because the defendant later wins an election would undermine the public’s perception of fairness in the criminal justice system.”

Nevertheless, there is a broad consensus among constitutional scholars that a state’s criminal prosecution of a president cannot continue while he’s in office.

Bragg’s team agreed with that principle, but stopped short of saying Trump’s sentencing can’t go forward before Trump is sworn in next month. The sentencing was originally set for Nov. 26 but was put off by the judge after Trump prevailed at the polls last month.

Prosecutors argued that Merchan can use various mechanisms to preserve the guilty verdict while taking steps to shield Trump from consequences that could be seen as hindering his ability to focus on his presidential duties.

The options include simply suspending the case until Trump’s term is over. Merchan could also announce in advance that he won’t sentence Trump to any jail time and won’t consider Trump’s conduct as president when determining a future sentence — a declaration, prosecutors said, that would dramatically reduce concerns about whether the looming sentence could impede Trump’s presidency.

Or, in a peculiar suggestion from prosecutors, Merchan could look to a procedure known as “abatement” that is used when a defendant dies after a verdict but while other aspects of the case remain pending. In such circumstances, the state “abates” the prosecution, a process that preserves the conviction but ends further proceedings.

Much of Bragg’s submission to the court consists of descriptions of how Trump sought to silence porn star Stormy Daniels just before the 2016 election by having attorney Michael Cohen pay her off with $130,000 and of Trump’s subsequent efforts to obscure the reimbursement.

Another section and a collection of exhibits are devoted to recounting Trump’s repeated rhetorical attacks on judges, prosecutors and witnesses — a pattern of behavior that prosecutors called Trump’s “exhaustively-documented history of disrespect for the judicial process.”