“Is there any limit to how many years the courts can volley back and forth Trump’s cases?”
— Gail Turzillo, Rochester, New York
Hi Gail,
There are limits to litigation. But hard as it might be to believe, we haven’t approached that point in any of Trump’s cases.
The situations are different, though, so we need to look at each case individually to get a sense of the timeline.
Of Trump’s four criminal cases, only one has gone to trial so far (the New York state case), and even there, the sentencing has been repeatedly delayed, most recently to post-Election Day. We still don’t know if it will go forward to sentencing because Judge Juan Merchan first needs to rule (also after Election Day) whether Trump can get his guilty verdicts overturned based on the Supreme Court’s decision granting broad presidential immunity from prosecution.
If Merchan rules against Trump, his lawyers have signaled that they’ll immediately appeal, so we could be back before the Supreme Court again in this case even before sentencing. If the sentencing goes forward, that will launch its own series of appeals, up through the state court system and probably to the Supreme Court, too.
Trump’s other state case, the Georgia election interference case, has been tied up on a pretrial appeal over whether the defense can disqualify Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis. That doesn’t have anything to do with the substance of the case, which still has its own unresolved litigation over the immunity ruling’s impact. All of that and more will need to be sorted out once the disqualification appeal is resolved — that is, if Willis wins and can stay on the case. If she and her office are booted, that’s an extra complication that could further thwart the case.
So even if Trump loses the election — which means he wouldn’t be able to further delay the state cases by virtue of being president — the full run of this litigation could easily take years to play out. That doesn’t mean it’s an infinite amount of time, but it won’t likely be quick, and how long it takes will partly come down to the judges’ discretion in deciding these matters. On the federal cases, Trump winning the election would almost immediately cut his criminal caseload in half because presidents can dismiss or pardon federal cases (though self-pardons are legally untested). If Trump loses, a question in the federal election interference case is how the Supreme Court will handle U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan’s forthcoming ruling on how much of the case survives the justices’ immunity ruling. That means that after Chutkan rules on Smith’s pending immunity motion, there will be another appeal up through the justices before any trial can go forward. If the case does survive the immunity ruling and Trump is convicted at trial, then only at that point would a lengthy appeals process begins. Meanwhile, special counsel Jack Smith is appealing U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon’s dismissal of the classified documents case to the federal appeals court. Whichever side loses will appeal to the Supreme Court. And to be clear, this appeal is only about one issue of many in the case — specifically, whether Smith was lawfully appointed. If the Supreme Court decides that issue, it could also affect the other federal case Smith is prosecuting. And if Smith wins the appeal but the appeals court doesn’t remove Cannon from the case — I don’t assume she would be removed — then she’ll have vast discretion not only over other issues in the case but its pacing as well. All that’s to say that these cases could easily take years to play out fully. But the question in the short term is whether Trump wins the election, which will determine how many cases against him are left. We should know next month how much will be left to analyze. Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for expert analysis on the top legal stories of the week, including updates from the Supreme Court and developments in Donald Trump’s legal cases.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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