Stalling: A proven legal strategy that continues to work for Trump
The schedule seemed to be stacked against Donald J. Trump: four criminal trials in four cities, all in the same year he runs for president.
But instead of dooming Trump, the chaotic calendar might just save him.
Mr. Trump, who as president helped reshape the federal judiciary, has already convinced the Supreme Court to postpone his trial in Washington. His lawyers have buried judges in Florida and Georgia in enough legal motions and procedural complaints that his cases have no set trial dates there either.
The Manhattan case, where Trump is accused of covering up a sex scandal during and after the 2016 presidential campaign, was the only one not embroiled in a possible postponement.
Until now.
On Friday, Judge Juan M. Merchan, who is overseeing the case, postponed the trial for at least three weeks, until mid-April.
It wasn’t the first case to be delayed during Trump’s recent string of legal troubles — and that’s no coincidence. As the former president tries to postpone any of his trials until after the election, he is relying on his most proven strategy: seek every delay available within the law.
The postponement of the Manhattan trial – the first prosecution of a former US president – follows the recent disclosure of more than 100,000 pages of investigative data that may impact the case. Citing the documents, Mr. Trump’s lawyers asked for a 90-day delay in the trial, while Manhattan District Attorney Alvin L. Bragg proposed a delay of up to 30 days.
The delay in Manhattan also came on the same day that Trump’s other state case — in Georgia, where he was accused of tampering with that state’s 2020 election results — had its own tumultuous development: one of the top prosecutors in the procedural, who had a romantic relationship with the prosecutor who filed the charges, decided to resign after a judge decided that one of them had to leave.
The day’s events showed that the cases, in which Mr. Trump is accused of a remarkable series of crimes, will continue even as the former president drags on.
When faced with legal challenges, as he has done for decades in civil courts, Mr. Trump tries to manipulate the schedule. Whether or not the facts are in his favor, he is playing a game of calendar calculus to pit one case against another, hoping to push them past the election.
If he wins, things should stop as soon as he comes to power. It has long been policy that a sitting president cannot stand trial on criminal charges.
Until the election, his goal appears to be to engineer the prosecution equivalent of a four-car pileup at the busiest legal intersection in America. And despite Mr. Trump’s laments about a cabal of liberal Deep State prosecutors putting their heads together to conspire against him, the reality is that there is not a single cop directing traffic.
Mr. Trump has exploited that divide by proposing delays in one case that ultimately affected other cases and assigning the same lawyers to multiple cases, only to turn around and claim their schedules conflicted.
While Mr. Trump began the year facing the terrifying prospect of trials in at least two of his criminal cases before the election — not to mention a pair of civil lawsuits that dealt the former president a devastating financial blow — the only date on his The legal role must now be ‘determined’.
William W. Taylor III, a veteran white-collar attorney in Washington, D.C., who has tried cases in federal and state courts across the country, said Mr. Trump was hardly the only defendant seeking to delay a trial.
“Anyone facing four criminal cases has four serious problems,” he said. “The last thing you want to do when you’re in the position of being a suspect in these cases is for any of these issues to be resolved.”
Some of Trump’s success can be written off as luck. But his willingness to test the limits of traditional democratic systems, including the courts, has required his legal opponents to anticipate developments beyond their control. They essentially have to play a perfect game. But so far that has not been the case, as evidenced by the delay in the Manhattan case.
Trump’s other criminal cases have also been affected by his delay strategy, but may also eventually make progress.
If the Supreme Court rules in June as expected, Trump’s federal criminal case in Washington, where he is accused of conspiring to overturn the 2020 election, could theoretically go to trial around September. But if that happens, there is no guarantee that the jury hearing the case will reach a verdict before the November election.
Trump’s case in Georgia, on charges of tampering with that state’s election, is also in flux — albeit for different reasons. On Friday, the judge overseeing the case refused to remove Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis from the case until Nathan Wade, the deputy with whom she was dating, resigned.
Mr. Wade did just that and avoided a legal disaster. While his decision will likely help the case move forward, it could easily prove beneficial to Trump’s efforts to politically discredit the case.
The weeks spent gathering evidence about Ms. Willis’ relationship with the deputy, Nathan Wade, also burned valuable time in a case she would like to take before a jury in August. That may prove unrealistic, as the judge in the case, Scott McAfee, has not ruled on when he wants the trial to begin.
There is also no set date for the trial in Trump’s secret documents case in Florida. While the judge overseeing the case, Aileen M. Cannon, is slowly moving the case forward — she rejected one of Mr. Trump’s requests to dismiss the case on Thursday — she has not yet said when the trial will begin , even though she held a hearing two weeks ago specifically to decide that question.
Two of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, Todd Blanche and Emil Bove, represent him in both Manhattan and Florida, and they have tried to pit the two cases against each other, complaining to Judge Cannon that their client would have a hard time getting a to attend a hearing. standing trial in one place while attending hearings in another.
“Think about what that means,” Mr. Blanche told Judge Cannon during the hearing two weeks ago. “That means President Trump will be in a jury trial in New York all day Monday and all day Tuesday. He has to come home Tuesday night, come to this courtroom to argue more than a dozen motions, then go back to his house and fly back to New York for a jury trial the next day.
For months, the Manhattan case seemed immune to Trump’s delaying tactics.
When Judge Merchan convened a hearing last month to set the trial date, Mr. Trump’s legal team argued for a delay. Mr. Blanche called the schedule “inscrutable,” arguing that “we are in the middle of primary season,” and claiming the process would overlap with dozens of Republican primaries and caucuses.
Judge Merchan was unmoved. At one point the judge instructed Mr Blanche to ‘stop interrupting me, please’ and to ‘tell me something you haven’t said today’.
He set the trial for March 25.
But soon after the hearing, the new stack of records appeared. They came courtesy of federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York, who had previously investigated a hush-money payment at the center of Bragg’s case against Trump.
Mr. Bragg’s prosecutors had requested records from the Southern District last year and had received some, but not all, of what they requested.
Mr. Trump’s lawyers then subpoenaed the Southern District, which in turn produced more than 100,000 pages of documents and turned them over to both the defense and prosecution earlier this month. Only a subset of those documents are considered relevant to the case.
It’s unclear why federal prosecutors didn’t give the district attorney, a close partner to law enforcement, all the material sooner. But the Southern District is so fiercely independent that it is known in prosecutor circles as the sovereign district of New York.
Mr. Bragg’s prosecutors also said they were willing to start the trial on March 25 as scheduled, but would not oppose a 30-day delay “out of an abundance of caution and to ensure that the suspect sufficient time to review the new case.” materials.”
Prosecutors allege the delay was orchestrated by Mr. Trump. He didn’t manage to request the records from the Southern District until January — nearly nine months after he was indicted. And according to Mr. Bragg’s office, the former president has “agreed to repeated extensions of the deadline” for the Southern District.
While Mr. Trump’s lawyers recently asked Judge Merchan to dismiss the case because, they alleged, prosecutors had failed to turn over the relevant documents, any delay in turning over the documents, Mr. Bragg, “resulted solely from defendant’s delay.”