The timing of Donald Trump’s criminal trials is finally coming into focus
Any day now the U.S. Court of Appeals will rule that presidential immunity doesn’t protect Donald Trump from being criminally tried for trying to overthrow the 2020 election. After that, the Supreme Court will likely decline to take up the case, and then his trial will start in Washington DC. But what is the exact timeframe at this point?
I think there’s still every reason to believe that the trial will start on time or something close to it. Why wouldn’t it? After all, most of the pretrial filings have already taken place – much to the chagrin of Trump, who has tried and failed to get Jack Smith held in contempt for making such filings.
But then a few days ago Judge Tanya Chutkan added some other trial to her calendar for early April. This has caused some pundits to decide that it means everyone is moving on and, well, Trump’s trial just isn’t going to happen. That is, of course, absurd. But now MSNBC is speculating that because the Chutkan trial is supposedly a lost cause, Trump’s Alvin Bragg criminal trial in New York could take place first.
Sure, this could happen. Bragg was the very first to criminally indict Trump. That trial was originally tentatively targeted for spring of 2024. But once it started to look like Trump’s Washington DC trial would also take place in that same timeframe, Bragg said he was willing to push back if necessary. This is because the charges in New York, while felonies, aren’t nearly as severe as those in other jurisdictions.
But if Trump’s trial with Jack Smith and Judge Chutkan does get pushed back from March to, say, the second half of April, then sure, his Alvin Bragg trial could end up taking place first.
From the very start there’s been this hilarious notion that because Trump had too many trials coming up, they were all somehow going to bump into each other, and none of them were going to happen. But that’s laugh out loud silly. Judges schedule trials for a living. They know what they’re doing. Their schedules aren’t wide open, but they know how to move things around and set their schedules accordingly.
So yeah, maybe Trump’s Washington DC criminal trial will be in March and his New York criminal trial will be after that. Or maybe his New York criminal trial will be in March and then his Washington DC criminal trial will take place in April. But is there any reason to expect that these trials aren’t going to happen, or are somehow going to cancel each other out? Of course not. And then by all accounts Trump’s Fulton County trial appears set for late summer. That would be three convictions, on dozens of felony counts, and multiple prison sentences, all before election day. Moving right along.
