No, Donald Trump and Kenneth Chesebro do not have a secret evil genius plan to defeat Fani Willis with a speedy trial
Yesterday former Trump attorney Kenneth Chesebro made the surprise move of filing for a speedy trial in Fulton County. Under Georgia state law, the court has to do everything it can to accommodate such a request. As soon as this happened, two thoughts came to mind: 1) Wow are these guys ever desperate. 2) We’ll see how long it takes the media to label this a secret evil genius master plan that’ll defeat Fani Willis and magically get Trump off the hook.
Sure enough, within hours, multiple major news outlets were busy cranking out articles about how Willis’ case against Trump was suddenly in huge trouble. The theory goes that Willis wants to try all nineteen defendants together under RICO statutes, but Chesebro’s request for a speedy trial means the courts might order Willis to try Chesebro within a couple months. And if the courts don’t also order a speedy trial for Trump and the others, Chesebro would have to be tried on his own, first, before the others. This would then somehow magically help Trump get off the hook.
Just how is this supposed to work? Well, those kinds of details always get conveniently glossed over by the people in the media who are trying to convince us we’re doomed. If you take a minute to think this through, you realize that if this is some kind of plot between Trump and Chesebro, it’s one of the dumbest plots of all time. For one thing, the evidence against Chesebro is overwhelming. Even if he’s able to get tried by himself, his odds of acquittal will not go up. He’ll just end up in prison sooner.
Nor would an early Chesebro trial help Trump in any definable way. We keep hearing buzz phrases like “this is a test run” and “it’ll force Willis to show her cards” but that’s not how anything really works. Fani Willis is a career prosecutor who’s been doing this for years, not the kind of hapless buffoon who can be magically befuddled by a simplistic filing on the part of one of her RICO defendants. If Trump and Chesebro are coordinating on this, it’s because they’re idiots who mistakenly think Willis is an idiot, and it’ll only backfire on them.
Think it through. With Chesebro staking himself to a speedy trial, and Willis asking the courts to let her try all the defendants together, if anything it could motivate the courts to quickly deny all of Trump’s delay tactics so that he can be swiftly tried with Chesebro. If Trump is in on this with Chesebro, then Trump is even worse at this than we thought.
That’s why it seems more likely that Chesebro is taking this action on his own. Why? Chesebro is also likely about to be separately indicted by Jack Smith, so it’s possible that Chesebro is trying to hurry up and find out just how much prison time he’s facing in Georgia, before he decides whether to cut a deal with the Feds to stave off his second indictment.
On the other hand, Chesebro is the kind of guy who reportedly followed unhinged carnival barker Alex Jones around the Capitol grounds on January 6th, so everything about this screams that Chesebro isn’t all there. He may be delusional enough to think that his conspiracy theories are going to get him acquitted, and he wants that imaginary acquittal to come as soon as possible.
But one way or the other, this Chesebro request for a speedy trial probably comes down to what it always comes down to these days: Trump and/or his pals simply being idiots who don’t know what they’re doing, and are too arrogant or too unhinged to listen to actual legal advice.
Back when Mark Meadows appeared to be providing partial cooperation against Donald Trump, we had to listen to media and pundit theories about how Meadows was giving up just enough useless information on Trump to keep himself from getting indicted while also keeping Trump from getting indicted. But if that was the plan, it went so poorly that Meadows ended up helping to get Trump indicted while getting himself indicted. It’s hard to have a “plan” that works out worse than that.
We also had to hear media and pundit theories about how Rudy Giuliani had a plan to save himself by partially cooperating against Trump. But if that was the plan, it worked out so poorly that they both ended up getting indicted. Again, if there even was a “plan” here, it was one of the stupidest plans of all time, and backfired spectacularly.
After all this endless doomsday hype about how Trump and this or that co-conspirator had come up with some secret evil genius plan to magically get themselves off the legal hook, only for none of that speculation to have ever turned out to be within a million miles of realistic, I’m not that interested in hearing about how Trump and Chesebro now supposedly have some genius master plan. It just never turns out to be the case with these idiots.
One of the big problems for Trump and his closest co-conspirators is that they’ve all achieved some degree of past success in life. It’s generally been a result of some combination of privilege, malice, and luck. But they’ve come to convince themselves that their past successes are because they’re geniuses. And so even now that they’re facing complete disaster, they’re insisting on continuing to make the same blind random stupid moves in the dark that they’ve always made. Except none of it is working, because this isn’t right wing politics, it’s the criminal justice system.
You know what the “secret evil genius plan” was in all this? To cut a cooperation deal early on, back when immunity was still on the table. And you know who was “genius” enough to take those deals? Eight fake electors in Georgia. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago tech support guy. These are people who realized they’d been caught doing stupid things, and understood that the only smart play was to immediately cut a deal while the most lenient deals were still available. And as a result they won’t see one day of prison time.
Meanwhile people like Trump, Meadows, Giuliani, and Chesebro, who think they’re geniuses, are all still convinced that they’re one simplistic faux-clever court filing away from being magically off the hook. Nothing ever, ever, ever works that way. This is the criminal justice system, not tiddlywinks. And they’re insisting upon finding that out the hard way.
It’s why I just roll my eyes and chuckle each time Trump and his clowns seem to think they’ve come up with some clever new way to get themselves off the legal hook. It simply never works. They don’t know what they’re doing, and not willing to listen to those who do know how things work.
Just ask Trump goons Mark Meadows and Jeffrey Clark, who each baselessly asked the courts to block them from being arrested in Fulton County. Once the courts finished laughing, they rejected those requests. These moves had zero chance of working, and they managed to delay things by zero days. It’s a common theme in Trump world these days. These folks simply have no idea what they’re doing. It’s just so plainly obvious. And it’s safe to tune out those who keep trying to bring attention to themselves by arbitrarily claiming that Trump and his people do somehow know what they’re doing when it comes to the criminal justice. That sentiment keeps proving false 100% of the time.
