It appears the Biden DOJ’s special counsel hopes to tether Biden’s GOP opponent to courtrooms from early summer through Election Day.
There is an important court session today in the Mar-a-Lago documents prosecution of former president Trump by Biden Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith. At the top of the agenda is the schedule.
Bear in mind that Trump-obsessed enthusiasts of Smith’s prosecutions are freaking out over the Supreme Court’s sensible decision to review Trump’s immunity claim in Smith’s election-interference case in Washington, D.C. (the subject of our editorial today). They are angry because this necessarily pushes the trial into at least midsummer because (a) the Court is unlikely to rule before late June, and (b) the trial judge, Tanya Chutkan, is bereft of jurisdiction to take any meaningful action on the case until the justices issue their decision. As our editorial elaborates, much of the outrage is theater — the trial was going to be delayed anyway because, in a separate case, United States v. Fischer, the high Court is going to rule on the obstruction statute that is central to Trump’s case. Hence, even without the immunity issue, the trial was going to be delayed until midsummer, at least.
That’s why I thought readers would be interested to know that, just yesterday, Smith asked Florida federal district judge Aileen Cannon to schedule the Mar-a-Lago case to begin on July 8, 2024. It is reasonable to expect that the trial — in a case involving three defendants charged in a 53-page indictment, which alleges 42 felony-count indictments and involves voluminous discovery — will take one to two months, if not more.
As I’ll explain in another post, I don’t think Smith’s proposal is realistic. Trump continues to push for the trial to be formally postponed until after the election, but since Judge Cannon has insisted on a pre-Election Day proposal, the former president and putative Republican presidential nominee has suggested an August 12 commencement date.
To my mind, this elucidates that Smith knows it is unrealistic to believe the election-interference case could begin before September.
If the only hold-up were Fischer (in which Trump is not a party), Judge Chutkan could currently by overseeing the several weeks of litigation and preparation which must be completed prior to trial; it might make sense, in those circumstances, to talk about a July trial date (whether such a date was realistic would depend on how much, if at all, the Court’s Fischer ruling will necessitate an overhaul of Smith’s indictment). But because the immunity issue is now before the Supreme Court, all lower-court proceedings in the election-interference case are frozen. Chutkan is without authority to get the pretrial litigation moving.
After the high Court’s anticipated June rulings (on both immunity and obstruction), it will take at least a month or two after to get ready for trial — including to agree upon a questionnaire form that must be mailed out well in advance of the commencement date. (As this suggests, I am anticipating that Trump will lose on the immunity issue but that the Court’s obstruction ruling could materially affect the case, to Trump’s benefit.)
Consequently, Smith is moving on. If he really believed he could get Trump to trial on the election-interference case by July, he wouldn’t be asking for a July 8 trial in the Mar-a-Lago case. Given all Smith’s rhetoric about the supposed public interest in getting the election-interference case tried prior to Election Day, I surmise that he is anticipating a September date for the start of that two to three month trial.
Wait a minute, you may be asking (as some in the media are already asking): What about the Justice Department’s unwritten rule about not taking actions that might influence voters within two months of an election? Wasn’t that the Biden DOJ’s rationale for not taking overt investigative actions in late 2020 against the president’s son — even though Hunter Biden wasn’t even on the ballot as a candidate?
Yep, I know. But as I’ve pointed out before, the operative word in there is unwritten. The so-called 60-day rule is not actually a rule. It’s more like a prudential guideline, or a norm. As we’ve seen time and again, the Democrats’ lawfare against Trump leaves no norms standing. And as for keeping the Justice Department out of politics, the whole point of Smith’s investigations has been to influence the course of the 2024 campaign and, ultimately, the outcome of the election. The 60-day rule? Pfft.
Again, I don’t think a July 8 trial date in the Mar-a-Lago case is realistic. Smith would obviously disagree, given his ludicrous original proposal to start the trial in late 2023. But allowing that Smith is serious, let’s keep in mind that a defendant must attend every day of a criminal trial.
I can only assume the Biden Justice Department’s special counsel is hoping to have President Biden’s opponent in the 2024 campaign tethered to courtrooms from early summer through Election Day, starting in Florida on July 8, then moving to Washington, D.C., sometime in September.