The Only Way Out of This is to Vote

Let’s cut to the chase: this has been a fairly depressing week in Trump legal news. Despite foreshadowing it in my column last weekend, the decision by the Supreme Court to hear the former president’s immunity claim still came as a shock. In a cruel irony, tomorrow was the original start date for the trial. Less than a week before jury selection would have begun, we got the news that SCOTUS would hear his claim at the end of next month, which makes a trial before election day seem like a remote possibility.

As if that wasn’t hard enough to stomach, the news trickling out of the scheduling hearing in Florida (for the case involving the willful retention of national defense information) was also concerning. On February 29, both sides submitted their scheduling proposals ahead of the hearing a day later. Jack Smith requested a trial date of July 8. After a couple of pages of now-familiar ranting about being “the leading candidate” in the upcoming election and assertions that “a fair trial cannot be conducted this year”, Trump’s attorneys finally suggested August 12 as a start date, but only because they’d been ordered to submit one.

This date suggestion from the defense is obviously made in bad faith for numerous reasons, not least of which is the Trump team’s legal strategy, reported earlier by CNN, of using the Florida trial to block the calendar for Judge Chutkhan’s D.C. trial – if and when the case returns to her. As CNN reported, “one way to hamper Chutkhan is to convince…Aileen Cannon to move Trump’s Mar-a-Lago document mishandling trial from late May until the summer.” The plan after that is to get Judge Cannon to keep nudging the trial further ahead in time, making it impossible for the D.C. case to find space on the calendar. And it seems Cannon may be sympathetic to this approach, as she was reportedly skeptical of the timeline proposed by the Special Counsel during the hearing. Jay Bratt, a top prosecutor on Jack Smith’s team, pointed out the defense’s delay strategy to the judge, saying “it really seems to me…that these were fake dates…we just need to bring this case to trial this summer.” Cannon gave every indication that she didn’t agree.

There were other eyebrow-raising moments in the hearing. Cannon seemed to be leaning towards granting Trump’s ludicrous request to widen the scope of the prosecution team to include numerous federal agencies, including the White House, the National Archives and Records Administration, and practically the entire intelligence community. Trump has argued that the prosecution team is vast, encompassing wide swaths of the federal government, and that he’s therefore entitled to troves of additional discovery. His motions seeking such documents are textbook examples of a ‘fishing expedition’, something that is barred by precedent and procedure. Yet Cannon may grant Trump’s request.

She also made clear that she’s not on board with the Special Counsel’s request to keep witness statements and information under seal to protect their safety. After Cannon ruled last month to unseal documents containing sensitive witness information, the Special Counsel submitted a motion for reconsideration, calling her ruling a “clear error”. At the hearing, she asked prosecutor David Harbach about unsealing the information, which appeared to alarm the Special Counsel’s team, with multiple outlets reporting that Jack Smith, who was in the courtroom, looked “visibly shocked”.

It looks increasingly like the only criminal case that will go to trial before the election is the hush money/2016 election interference case brought by Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg. While that was the first investigation to result in indictment, it’s the one with the least legal peril for the former president and a guilty verdict doesn’t necessarily mean prison time. With Fani Willis’ case in Georgia also derailed at the moment while the judge assesses defense claims of a conflict of interest on the part of the Fulton County D.A., the two federal cases are of the utmost importance - and Trump is reportedly most afraid of Judge Chutkhan’s D.C. case. I spent the week catastrophizing about what would happen if he wins in November and therefore evades justice for attempting to overthrow an election and stealing national defense information. The fact that he could see both federal cases disappear ironically solidifies the GOP refrain of “two-tiered justice system!” It would be two-tiered, in his favor. No one else would be able to escape the law for committing such offenses. A week of catastrophizing isn’t much fun, but it doesn’t have to be unproductive. There’s a way out of this and that’s to vote. Let the anger and dismay light a fire under you and use it to get everyone you know to the polls. Democracy, the rule of law, and the Constitution are on the ballot.