CNN
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As last summer drew to a close, four criminal cases filed against former President Donald Trump posed an extraordinary political crisis and the very real threat that the Republican front-runner in the 2024 presidential election would be convicted by multiple juries before the first vote was cast.
In just one year, a lot has changed. Or, more accurately, nothing has.
The Supreme Court’s presidential immunity ruling on Monday increases the likelihood that a federal election interference trial will take place before the election, potentially allowing President Trump to avoid a pre-election trial on the three most significant criminal charges he faces.
He was convicted at his fourth trial, but the hush-money lawsuit brought by the Manhattan district attorney was widely seen as the least significant and the most irrelevant to the choice voters will make on Nov. 5, because it used a controversial legal theory to target conduct that had been publicly known for nearly a decade.
He may not even receive any prison time in this case.
Also, while it’s unlikely, a source told CNN that President Trump’s legal team filed a letter on Monday challenging the former president’s conviction in New York state based on the Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity.
“Sadly, of these four cases, this one furthers Trump’s narrative of political persecution, and it’s tragic,” said Ty Cobb, who served as Trump’s White House counsel during the Russia investigation and is now an opponent of his reelection.
“I [narrative of political persecution]”I fear this sentence will have a bigger impact on the election than a guilty verdict would,” Cobb said.
Americans will go to the polls this fall without a verdict on whether President Trump broke federal and state laws by trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election, or whether he violated national security laws by concealing classified documents after leaving office.
The November election will not only choose the nation’s next leader; it will also determine Trump’s legal fate. If elected, Trump is widely expected to drop the federal charges, either by ordering his attorney general to drop them or by pardoning himself. Meanwhile, the Georgia election interference case is on hold while an appeals court considers removing Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis from the case, and prosecutors now face other major hurdles.
“If Donald Trump wins the election, his criminal trial will not be able to go forward,” said Paul Rosenzweig, who worked on the Whitewater investigation into Bill Clinton and later served in the Department of Homeland Security. “We cannot expect the criminal justice system to save us. Ultimately, it is the electoral system that will decide our fate.”
Several factors contributed to Trump’s apparent escape from criminal liability before the election. As the saying goes, the wheels of justice turn slowly, but Trump benefited from legal privileges and lucky escapes not available to other defendants.
That includes a well-funded legal strategy built around delays, missteps by opponents, almost unbelievable case-allocation coincidences, and a Supreme Court decision that has now delayed and marred what was a marquee case against the former president.
“Clearly the law can be used as an instrument of justice or it can be used as an instrument of injustice,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat who led the House’s second impeachment team against Trump.
“Rules can be used to confuse people and dilute the moral clarity of a situation, or they can be used to clarify the moral meaning of a situation,” Raskin said in an interview with CNN last week.
Special Counsel Jack Smith’s charges that Trump interfered with the 2020 election were the penultimate of four lawsuits filed. The case hit key legal ground and raised significant, never-before-seen legal questions.
But this case got off to the fastest start, thanks in part to District Judge Tanya Chutkan’s absolute tolerance for laxity, and by the end of last year it looked likely to be the first case to reach a jury, with a trial scheduled for March.
Smith tried to keep the momentum going by rushing to the Supreme Court in December on an issue he said needed to be decided before the trial: whether presidential immunity, as Trump has asserted it, would protect him from prosecution.
But the Supreme Court did not follow Judge Smith’s plan, rejecting his request to expedite the normal appeal process, which would first go to the D.C. Circuit. After that circuit ruled in its entirety to reject Trump’s sweeping arguments, the Supreme Court paused the case this spring to make a final decision.
The justices’ deliberations in the case led to a four-month halt to pretrial proceedings, and Monday’s ruling raises the possibility that the case could be extended for several more months before a jury can hear the charges.
But some of Trump’s critics have defended the Supreme Court’s response, noting that the case moved quickly by the court’s standards.
“For the first time in history, you can’t indict a former president for a crime without going to the Supreme Court,” Cobb said.
Cobb said the D.C. Circuit should bear some of the blame for the delay because the ruling was “more of a body blow than an accurate assessment of the law.”
Chief Justice John Roberts’ majority opinion specifically noted that the lower courts lacked a “factual analysis” explaining why another pretrial hearing was necessary.
But the Supreme Court’s decision won’t just delay the case: it will make it significantly harder for prosecutors to prove their cases if they do go to trial. The conservative majority ruled that what it deemed to be “official” presidential acts are not only subject to immunity, but also cannot be used as evidence to support charges targeting Trump’s non-official conduct.
“Much of the evidence that Mr. Smith had that suggested the criminality of what Mr. Trump was trying to do has now been declared off limits,” said Rosenzweig, who signed on as an amicus curiae opposing Mr. Trump’s arguments in the Supreme Court case.
Compared with Smith’s first election interference case, the classified dossier indicting Trump was, in theory, a simpler and more succinct indictment.
The allegations that Trump illegally retained national defense information and obstructed a federal investigation into that material focus almost entirely on his actions after leaving the White House, and many of the cases resemble those the Justice Department routinely brings against government officials who mishandle national secrets.
But Mr. Smith had the misfortune of being assigned to a South Florida judge on the case, and in a random drawing he chose Eileen Cannon, a young and inexperienced Trump appointee who had previously presided over a case challenging the FBI’s search of Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate and who had been criticized by a conservative appeals court for giving preferential treatment to the former president.
In the criminal case, Judge Cannon has been taking months to rule on pretrial disputes that legal experts say are far from close. She has drawn out the process by demanding days of hearings on Trump’s unlikely claims. She has so far rejected Trump’s efforts to have the charges dropped but has indicated she will allow his outlandish and legally questionable claims about the case to be presented before a jury.
Assuming Trump doesn’t finish the case once he takes office, it could be years before the charges go to trial — and Cannon’s flawed handling of the case will almost certainly lead to a chaotic appeal process.
“Mr. Cannon’s conduct is a historical anomaly for a federal judge,” Cobb said.
If Cannon’s appointment was an incredible stroke of luck for Trump, Willis’s lapse in judgment was a godsend.
Prosecutors’ charges against Trump and 18 co-defendants for allegedly meddling in Georgia’s 2020 election are currently on indefinite hold while a Georgia appeals court reviews ethics allegations surrounding a romantic relationship between a prosecutor and an assistant prosecutor.
The appeals court could decide to disqualify Willis, which would effectively throw out the entire case, a source told CNN.
Willis and her defenders say her affair with Nathan Wade, who served as her top prosecutor, did not violate any ethical standards. But it may have stunted her prosecution, and even those who supported her case say she should have used better judgment given its severity. It is the only state election interference indictment against the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, and it is a criminal case that would not qualify for a pardon if Trump is reelected.
After the judge said Willis could stay on the case as long as Wade was removed, the defense appealed the ruling and had prosecutors put the charges on hold while the appeal continued, a process that could take months and virtually guarantees the case will go to trial before the November election.
04:06 – Source: CNN
Watch the moment Nathan Wade’s team interrupts his interview with Kaitlan Collins
The fallout from Willis’ own actions, combined with the Supreme Court’s decision on immunity, means Trump may never be tried in Fulton County, regardless of whether he wins the 2024 election.
If the trial is allowed to resume, the judge, Fulton County Judge Scott McAfee, would have to conduct the same presidential immunity analysis required by the U.S. Supreme Court in federal election subversion cases.
CNN analyst Michael Moore pointed to the Georgia anti-organized crime statute that the charges are based on and said it was likely to significantly hinder the construction of the case.
“The normal benefit of this charge is that each defendant can be held accountable for the misdeeds of his or her co-defendants,” said Moore, who served as U.S. attorney in Georgia under President Barack Obama. But the Supreme Court’s new immunity standard threatens to use much of this practice in this case.
“I think this litigation regarding Trump is probably over,” Moore said.
This story has been updated with additional details.
CNN’s Kara Scannell, Lauren Fox and Zachary Cohen contributed to this report.
