The Trump Trials Timeline
Bottom Line: This week is an especially important week legally for the presidential campaign of the former and perhaps future President of the United States. On Thursday the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in the Trump ballot access case which will ultimately determine whether states can use the 14th Amendment’s insurrection clause as justification for removing Donald Trump’s name from ballots. While the original challenge stems from a Colorado ballot access case pertaining to the primary election in that state, and subsequently Maine following the Secretary of State’s decision to attempt to remove Trump in that state’s primary, the much bigger implications, rest with what the decision would mean for general election ballots should Trump become the Republican presidential nominee as is expected. However, on Friday, preceding this important legal week for the Trump team, they won a massive procedural victory of sorts in federal court.
The juiciest bit of Trump legal news on Friday pertained to the formal disclosure by Fulton County, Georgia DA Fanni Willis that she has had a romantic relationship with the special prosecutor she hired, at above market rates and with no RICO prosecution experience, to prosecute the Trump RICO case. The disclosure and the potential fallout for DA Fanni Willis and her office, as she’s now under congressional and state investigations for potential criminal conduct, calls into question the legitimacy of her attempted criminal prosecution of Trump and various associates pertaining to the alleged effort to overturn Georgia’s 2020 presidential election results. And while that’s no doubt good news for team Trump – the better and most important news for the Trump team came in Washington D.C.
On Friday, D.C. Judge Tanya Chutkan, assigned to Special Prosecutor Jack Smith’s January 6th related case, removed the case from the docket indefinitely. That was the first criminal case scheduled to take place against Donald Trump March 4th. It also happens to be the criminal case posed in the least favorable setting for Trump as he won only 5% of the vote in 2020 and it’s likely he’d be facing a politically hostile jury pool. The indefinite delay is the result of the Trump team still litigating the matter of Presidential immunity, and whether it’s even possible for Donald Trump to be tried for the charges that have been brought before him in the four criminal cases pending against him.
What that now means is that schedule of pending criminal trials against Donald Trump looks like this:
- March 24th: New York State Stormy Daniels Hush Money Case
- May 20th: Federal classified documents case
- September 6th: Georgia state 2020 election case
- (On hold): Federal January 6th case
It remains to be seen whether the existing trial timeline will hold. Preceding the indefinite postponement of the January 6th related case it already appeared as though there would be a delay in the other pending federal case, the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case. With that being the case, and with the uncertainty surrounding the prosecutors in the Georgia criminal case, which wasn’t going to reach a conclusion prior to Election Day in November even if it started as originally scheduled, makes it possible that the New York State Stormy Daniels Hush money case could be the first case to be tried. That’s notable in that it’s widely viewed as being the weakest of the four pending criminal cases against Trump.