Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis informed the court that she seeks a trial date in the Trump RICO case of March 4, 2024, which coincidentally is the day before Super Tuesday. Proposed trial dates in the other cases are peppered before and after, but all before the presidential election in November.
In the New York County “hush money” case, the proposed date is March 25, 2024. In the Jack Smith documents case, it’s May 20, 2024. In the Smith J6 case, it’s January 2, 2024. In the Letitia James civil fraud case, it’s October 2, 2024, which Justice Arthur Engoron says is “written in stone.”
On the part of prosecutors, this rush to trial, a concern almost never seen from the prosecutorial side, is intended to get a verdict before the election, and certainly before the newly elected president takes office just in case. On the part of Trump and the handful of lawyers willing to risk life and pocketbook by representing him, delay until after the election is key.
While most Americans who support these prosecutions desperately want these trials to move ahead with great haste, want to see Trump convicted before anyone votes for president in the hope and expectation that his supporters will come to their senses and recognize that he’s not their savior, but a scoundrel, and thus not vote for him. Atop that hope, of course, is the hope of watching this narcissistic grifter get what he deserves.
Aside from the public’s desire of watching Trump convicted, however, is the fact that Trump is facing five trials, four of which are criminal, over the course of less than a year. No matter how strong the urge to see him lose, again and again and again and again, and again, he is entitled to the full panoply of due process rights that the Constitution guarantees every defendant. I know, principle sucks, but the thing about due process is that either every defendant gets it or none get it.
At the moment, Trump is represented in his cases by a few primary lawyers in small firms. The government has had as much time as it’s needed to do its investigation, gather its evidence, put the squeeze on recalcitrant witnesses and think long and hard about how it wants to proceed. Those few primary lawyers are now in the position of having to prepare their defense, make their motions, review their millions of pages of discovery, find their witnesses, prepare their witnesses, find them again after the FBI scares them off and try to convince them to testify no matter what nastiness the government threatened should they testify on Trump’s behalf
If Trump were facing one trial, it would be hard. Two would be monumental. But five? There is no way in hell that these lawyers can do a competent, no less zealous, job of preparing for trial within that time frame. And having Trump as a client, who is neither available to them when needed nor inclined to work with them as they advise him not to make hourly statements that will make an impossible job even more difficult, increases the difficulty by an order of magnitude, at least.
If the defense’s motive is to delay trial beyond the election in the hope that Trump will win, be elected president and then make at least some of these trials disappear, it’s unlikely to persuade any judge, Judge Cannon excepted, to be cooperative. It’s not that the defense isn’t allowed to devise whatever strategy it thinks will work, no matter how dubious and improper, but that doesn’t mean the judges have to play along.
However, there is a very legitimate claim to be argued that the proposed timing of these trials, both in the sense that they are very swift as well as serial such that there will be almost no time between them to prepare for the next, will deprive Trump of his Sixth Amendment right to counsel. That right isn’t limited to having a lawyer stand next to a defendant, but also having a lawyer who has had the time to do the labor demanded of competent counsel.
One way around this problem would be for Trump to retain different lawyers for each case rather than use the same lawyers for multiple cases. This could also include using bigger firms with more staff and resources that could deal with the vast amount of discovery more quickly than a couple of guys with an office. However, another part of that Sixth Amendment right is for the defendant to be allowed to use counsel of choice, provided he can afford to (another big issue, but not one involved here). There is also the problem of big firms wanting nothing to do with Trump, as his reputation as a deadbeat precedes him together with his toxic connection costing firms paying clients.
It’s possible that Trump’s defense lawyers will be left with no choice but to proceed to trial, one after another, etc., because the court says so. And no doubt they will, and they will do whatever they can do zealously represent their client because that’s what lawyers are supposed to do. But the fact that prosecutors, MSNBC hosts and much of the public wants to see this move forward post haste doesn’t mean that the defendant’s constitutional rights have been protected.
It’s quite possible that the hoopla of quick, serial trials as currently proposed will ultimately end up being delayed so that the defense has a legit opportunity to review the discovery. A few million pages takes a bit of time both to review and think about. Trust me on this. If it turns out that one case goes to trial while the others are delayed in order to allow the defense the opportunity to adequately prepare, don’t be surprised. Indeed, it wouldn’t be surprisingly is none of these cases go to trial before the election, no matter how badly you want to see Trump walked out of the courtroom in leg irons. And before you blame Trump for this, consider the couple of years after the 2020 election when the government did pretty much nothing to move this forward. Justice delayed is justice denied. Or so they say.
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at the risk of getting a deserved ‘stay in your lane’ rebuttal (for I am not a Georgia lawyer (but then again neither are a lot of the TV commentators)), it seems to me that one way to get DJT to want a speedy trial in the Georgia case is to deny him bail. And according to my legal research –eg, first hit in a google search– that’s not so farfetched. The Georgia Code Title 17 on Criminal Procedure says that “A court shall be authorized to release a person on bail if the court finds that the person… poses no significant risk of intimidating witnesses or otherwise obstructing the administration of justice.” The only wriggle room for the judge is the word “significant”–the presence of at least “some” risk is reasonably assumed, given if nothing else that he was charged with obstruction in another case
This has nothing to do with the post. Stay in your lane.
Given that Fulton County has people sitting in jail for over two years waiting to be indicted, maybe she should offer that same speedy trial schedule to them too.
Of course, the effect on the 2024 election is key to the strategies of both teams in this lawfare campaign. If the cases are railroaded to convictions before the election, it will make no strategic difference if some (or even all) of them are later reversed over the due process issues with the railroading. Especially if one or more of them establishes Trump’s guilt for “insurrection,” so that he arguably must be excluded from the ballot. The speediness is a necessity because of the political purposes in play.
Seems to me the Georgia DA has given a guide to other state , city and county DAs that they too can join the fray and can bring state law actions against people such as the present President for state crimes which almost certainly include bribery. Maybe it could be punted from there to a Federal Court but, so what?
The Democrat Arizona governor is already making noises about that state getting on board the “get Trump” train. Makes perfect sense from a revenge standpoint for a few Republican governors to do the same for Biden.
Are there any actual adults left in this process?
Hi there.
It is the” Democratic Governor”, not “Democrat”. And it is the AG, Kris Mayes, pondering this, not the governor. That is a serious tell. Actual lawyers in AZ read here at Simple Justice, and you are blowing poo.
Not for nothing, but it does not appear that any commenters read the post. But you already know that.
There is no constitutional right to have the courts factor into their scheduling Trump’s efforts to make his lawyers’ jobs difficult. If he wants to do that, fine. But it shouldn’t affect the analysis of when to hold a trial or trials.
That there is a literal mountain of discovery to analyze does sound like a reasonable reason to delay a trial. Trump not making himself available to his lawyers, not so much. Trump nuking his relationship with biglaw is also not the court’s problem to work around.
The trials should be held in a reasonable time and pace, but Trump being unreasonable shouldn’t factor into the definition of “reasonable time and pace”.
From the cheap seats, it’s infuriating to see the game being played, recognize the bullshit that’s being proffered by Cheeto’s attorneys, and accept that it has to be allowed. It’s plainly obvious that Team Insurrection’s legal strategy is not to actually fight the charges and prove his innocence, but to delay. Almost every move is coldly calculated to accomplish just that. Whether it’s using a single, small firm to represent him in all of his cases, or the absurd pre-trial motions being thrown at Cannon that, frankly, shouldn’t have succeeded, but for her complete and utter incompetence. And through it all, the point is obvious: to bullshit his way into a possible change of administrations to one that has no morals or backbone, so that he can, once again, avoid the accountability he deserves.
After watching him abuse our political processes to dismantle every political norm imaginable to attack our political systems from within (and the spineless GOP weasels who allowed him to do it), it’s infuriating to see him now doing the same in the judicial system. He’s using the protections which, as a matter of principle, we afford defendants, to subvert the judicial process for his own ends.
For fuck’s sake, two of his co-defendants have counsel who are simultaneously representing witnesses against them in the very same trial, forcing a delay to tell the defendants “this is probably a bad idea, bro.” It’s a patently absurd conflict of interest, and yet the perfect dilatory move. Under reasonable circumstances, it makes sense that a single attorney might initially represent several similarly situated individuals during a grand jury investigation. Fine. But at the point one of those parties flips on the others, reasonable people should realize their attorney would be obviously hamstrung in crossing his own client, and they would rightly choose a different attorney. Hell, the attorney himself ought to realize it and get the hell out. Here? Fuck it. We can use it to stall! Full steam ahead, I’ll keep paying the attorney to represent folks on both sides of the trial!
But the alternative is to let one monster cause us to take away those protections for everyone else, thereby weakening our judicial system even further. Hell of a choice to make, aint it?