Look what happened. Is this crazy? We stand on the verge of the four greatest years in the history.

Make America great victory. How can you be against them?

Donald Trump will have no penalty, not probation, jail time, or even a fine for his felony conviction in the New York Hush Money case.

But he goes down in history as a felon, and the conviction of 34 felony counts stands on his record.

Welcome to this special episode of Sidebar from The Washington Post.

I'm Libby Casey, and I'm joined in studio by my

colleagues, Ronda Colvin, James Holman, and J.M. Rieger. We're also joined by Shana Jacobs, who's in

New York and just witnessed the sentencing hearing. Shana, thank you so much for taking a moment

from your crazy deadlines to join us. Really grateful for that. So let's recap this breaking news day.

So on Friday morning, New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Mershan gave Trump an unconditional discharge.

The court released audio of the sentencing, so we'll be able to play some of that for you.

And in, in fact, to dive in, let's just hear Judge Mershahn, in his own words, delivering the sentence.

This court has determined that the only lawful sentence that permits entry of a judgment of conviction without encroaching upon the highest office in the land is an unconditional discharge, which the New York State Legislature has determined, is a lawful

and permissible sentence for the crime of falsifying business records in the first degree.

Okay, Rhonda, what does this mean, practically speaking?

Well, practically speaking, as you've described, it is a sentence that will not have any sort of punitive measures, such as a fine, jail time, probation, all of those things.

I think, and for those people who were listening to us earlier this week, we were talking about this, that it appeared that the judge wanted to just tie this up, to have some closure to a case that was heard by a jury of Donald Trump's peers.

They came back with a decision.

And this sort of was just, you know, the end of that entire process.

So it almost felt just like a formality.

We kind of knew it was going in this direction.

I think Mershahn had signaled before that he would not, you know, assess any sort of jail time or

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