With Donald Trump’s two federal criminal cases headed for the legal trash bin and the fate of his sentencing in the New York state case uncertain, the Georgia election interference case has taken on a more prominent role.
But just because presidents can’t pardon or dismiss state cases doesn’t mean that the Georgia case will proceed against Trump as normal. The president-elect’s defense lawyer already signaled last year that if Trump won the election, he’d seek to push any trial until after he leaves office. Now that he has won the election, it’s reasonable to assume that the defendant won’t stand trial in Fulton County while running the country.
That would push any Trump Georgia trial off for several years, at least. That’s a long way, but in the context of this case’s strange trajectory, it’s less of a true delay than it might seem at first glance.
Even if Trump had lost the election, he wouldn’t have been headed to trial anytime soon. The case has been paused for a pretrial appeal in which the defense is trying to disqualify Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis. That alone would push any trial into next year, if not beyond. And should Willis and her office be kicked off the case, then that would add another delay to the prosecution and introduce uncertainty as to when — and perhaps whether — a new office or prosecutor would take it over.
Another factor is that Trump is not the only defendant on the 2020 election-related racketeering indictment. More than a dozen others remain. Even if some of them plead guilty, it’s hardly guaranteed that all of the remaining defendants would be tried in just one proceeding, as opposed to multiple trials. An ongoing unrelated racketeering trial brought by the same office is already the longest in the state’s history, showing how much time it could take to see this complex case through to verdict.
Yet another related factor is the ongoing effort by Trump’s co-defendants to move their state charges to federal court. Former Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows has a pending Supreme Court petition on the matter, which the justices are slated to consider taking up on Friday. How the court resolves that issue could add further delays and complications. Plus, there are outstanding legal issues that need to be resolved before any Trump trial goes forward, including the immunity issue stemming from the Supreme Court decision in the federal election interference case that granted Trump broad criminal immunity. So, several things besides Trump’s impending return to the White House have already delayed and mired this prosecution — and could delay and mire it further. That one of the defendants will become president again is just one more. 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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