By going to court over privilege, Donald Trump may have managed to speed up his own indictment for contempt
In a move that came as no surprise whatsoever, the U.S. Court of Appeals has swiftly and unanimously ruled against Donald Trump over his imaginary privilege case. This was always going to happen, and it was always going to happen in roughly this timeframe. This is one of these things where there just wasn’t any suspense.
For those asking, the Supreme Court will either decline to take up Trump’s privilege case, or take up the case but swiftly rule against him within weeks. There’s no scenario where he wins, or manages to drag it out for a long time. Not on something as laugh out loud as this case.
What’s remarkable is that Trump won’t have really gained anything by going to court. The January 6th Committee is still working its way through nailing, flipping, and busting mid-level witnesses, and hadn’t worked its way up to Trump yet anyway. At this rate the committee will get the incriminating records against Trump right around the time it’s ready to subpoena him as a hostile witness.
More to the point, because Trump will have already definitively lost his privilege argument in court, the committee will have an easy time of ringing him up for contempt if he fails to comply with his subpoena, and the DOJ will have an easy time making contempt charges stick against him.
If anything, by going to court over privilege when he did instead of waiting until after he’s referred for contempt, Trump has only helped ensure that he’ll end up indicted for contempt sooner than he otherwise might have. If Trump had waited to go to court over privilege until he was subpoenaed, the DOJ might have felt compelled to wait for the court process to play out before indicting him.
So Donald Trump isn’t helping himself with these moves, and is now at th stage of hurting himself. But Trump is at the point of making last ditch desperation moves, which by their nature tend to have very little chance of working, and a much greater chance of backfiring.
