(CNN) — Donald Trump is about to run out of time in his latest desperate attempt to avoid the historic stigma of being the first former president to go on criminal trial next week.
On Monday, the presumptive Republican candidate suffered a new defeat in an attempt to delay and move his hush money trial out of Manhattan. And on Tuesday, an appeals court thwarted another attempt to delay the start of the trial so Trump can challenge a partial gag order imposed by the court’s presiding judge.
Trump’s latest legal defeats place him, and the nation, on the threshold of a divisive spectacle that will further strain the judicial and political systems and could have an unpredictable impact on the November elections.
This case, which stems from payments to an adult film actress before the 2016 election, is just one of four criminal cases against the former president. He has pleaded not guilty in all cases against him.
As his legal options narrow, Trump’s attacks on the judge in the New York case and those involved in his other upcoming trials and his wild claims that he is the victim of political persecution are becoming more extreme. In an obscure Truth Social post over the weekend, Trump wondered how many “corrupt” judges he would have to “put up with before someone intervenes.”
And in a fundraising email, the former president lashed out at his “sham trial” and warned that “all hell will break loose” unless he receives a fresh injection of financial support. Judge Juan Merchán, who will preside over the case, last week extended a gag order on Trump after he named the judge’s daughter and attacked her on social media. Now the former president complains on his social network Truth Social that Merchán “is taking away my First Amendment rights.” An appeals court will still consider Trump’s request to lift the gag order, but Tuesday’s ruling means the trial will move forward while the proceedings unfold.
Trump’s increased efforts to delegitimize the trial in New York before it begins came as CNN obtained the jury questionnaire in the case, which reflects the unusual political context of this trial. Potential jurors will be questioned about where they get their news, whether they have been to a Trump rally and whether they have been a member of an extremist group like the Proud Boys. They will also be asked about their feelings towards the former president, but not which political party they belong to or who they voted for.
This is consistent with attempts made before all trials to ensure that juries can be fair and impartial in judging a case based on the evidence and not on their opinions or political biases.
Prosecutors in the case are not trying to prove that a hush money payment to Stormy Daniels in 2016 was illegal. Rather, they will tell the jury that the former president falsified business records to cover it up, in an attempt to deceive voters before the 2016 elections. But some critics of the case see the idea that it is electoral interference as exaggerated. And if there is one of the four criminal trials that Trump would prefer to happen first, it is this one.
Delays in the multiple cases surrounding Trump are often because he is exercising his rights as a defendant to exhaust his full right to appeal. But there is a clear tendency for him to use frivolous legal remedies to slow the path to trials. With just four business days until the trial begins in New York, the chances of him being further delayed are fading quickly. Still, Trump is one of the most prolific litigators in modern history, and given the political incentives he has to evade accountability, further far-reaching legal challenges cannot be ruled out.
If he fails to delay the opening of the trial on April 15, he will spend four days a week confined to a courthouse, leaving the campaign open to his rival, President Joe Biden. But the former president on Monday sought to mitigate one of his main vulnerabilities in the race, declaring that abortion, a potentially decisive issue in the general election, should be left to the states. Biden didn’t stand by, saying his predecessor couldn’t be trusted not to sign a federal ban if it ever passed Congress, adding at a fundraiser in Chicago: “Trump has problems and he’s knows. He’s worried about voters holding him accountable.
Special counsel tries to thwart another Trump delay tactic
In Washington, special counsel Jack Smith filed his latest brief with the Supreme Court on Monday, designed to derail Trump’s sweeping claim to presidential immunity that has delayed the start of his federal election interference trial. Trump argues that the office of the presidency would be neutralized if its occupants could be criminally prosecuted for their actions once they have left office. But Smith objected to this argument, which would implicitly mean that presidents have unchecked power.
“The effective functioning of the presidency does not require that a former president be immune from accountability for these alleged violations of federal criminal law,” Smith wrote. “To the contrary, a fundamental principle of our constitutional order is that no person is above the law, including the president.”
Smith also tried to head off another Trump tactic: a suggestion to the Supreme Court that the justices could send the case back to lower courts for further arguments if they believe a president has only partial immunity. That measure would delay the trial for many months, probably until after the elections. If re-elected, Trump would regain presidential powers that would allow him to paralyze or even completely end the federal case against him. The Supreme Court will hear arguments in the case on April 25, with a decision expected in July.
Smith’s attempts to get the former president before a jury are also being thwarted in Florida, where Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee, has been accused by many legal scholars of slowing down the upcoming trial over the former president’s storage of classified documents. .
Trump is making a new effort to hinder his election interference trial in Georgia, part of his ongoing efforts to try to prevent the other cases in which he has been charged from moving forward before the November election. Trump’s lawyers want the state appeals court to rule that his effort to pressure local officials to overturn his 2020 election loss was simply an exercise of his free speech. “There is no democracy without robust and uninhibited freedom of speech,” Trump lawyer Steve Sadow said in a statement.
Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee has already refused to dismiss the case under the notion that Trump’s actions constituted a protected exercise of free speech. Trump’s critics are likely to see his latest tactic as a typically obtuse argument to counter the facts, that he was not trying to destroy democracy, but to save it.
How Trump is trying to politicize jury trials
The key decision in the New York case on Monday centered on a claim by the former Republican president’s lawyers that their client cannot get a fair trial in the city where he became famous, and which is overwhelmingly liberal. Associate Judge Lizbeth González on Monday denied the motion to stop the trial while the matter is resolved and said there would be no further arguments on the issue.
Trump’s strategy is not new: he has already made similar claims about the fairness of being tried in Washington, another liberal city. However, prosecutors typically file charges in the jurisdiction where the alleged crime was committed. And if taken to their logical extremes, the former president’s arguments would mean that a political figure could only be tried in a place where the jury was made up of people who were likely to vote for him. Such a scenario would politicize the entire legal system and threaten the principle that everyone is equal before the law, even and especially former presidents and possibly future presidents.
During his Republican primary campaign, Trump knew how to take advantage of his four accusations, wielding the idea that he was a victim of politicized justice to rally the bases of the Republican Party around him and expel his rivals.
One of the biggest questions of this campaign will be whether the reality of an impeached president has a similar impact on the general electorate or whether it will spark a backlash against Trump, especially if he is found guilty.
2024-04-09 21:29:00
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