Donald Trump faces charges in federal court in Washington for attempting to block Biden from taking office in the White House beginning March 4.
On the same day, prosecutor Fani Willis moved to open the Georgia trial of the former president and 18 other co-defendants. And on the eve of Super Tuesday: that Tuesday, March 5, when fifteen states go to the polls in the primary, including giants like California and Texas, and a third of the delegates decide on the White House nominations are assigned.
As expected, the overlap between the will of the judges, who are hearing multiple lawsuits against Trump for various crimes, and the election calendar results in a hell of a plot that greatly facilitates the former president’s attempts to portray himself to voters as a victim of a judicial conspiracy , aimed at preventing his re-election.
The trial of Trump, who is accused of paying for the silence of a porn star with whom he had sexual relations, Stormy Daniels, while also committing tax evasion and false accounting, was scheduled to begin on March 25 in New York. In Georgia, following the indictment, arrest, mugshots and bail last week, Trump and the 18 other defendants are scheduled to appear again in court in Atlanta on September 6 to hear the allegations and plead guilty or innocent.
And Trump’s last White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, one of the defendants, has requested that the Georgia trial be transferred from the state judiciary to the federal courts: He argues that in the case of crimes committed in the White House, the judiciary does must be federal. Atlanta prosecutors take the opposite view, in part because a year after the end of his presidency, Trump continued to try to persuade Georgia election officials to support the “stolen election” thesis.
Tanya Chutkan, the Washington federal judge (appointed by Barack Obama) in charge of the trial for an assault on democracy sponsored by Special Counsel Jack Smith, showed with facts what she meant when she said she did not accept any political conditioning on them activity of justice. The public prosecutor had asked her to set the start of the trial for January 2, 2024. Defenders had suggested April 2026 as the date, a year and a half after the next presidential election.
Motivation: “You must give us time to review the 12 million pages of court documents attached to the case.” Chutkan denied the defense’s request and gave only two more months: He claims that almost all of these documents of the defense of Trump and the other defendants had long been available. And in any case, the heart of the court case lies in the 58,000 pages on the basis of which the popular grand jury decided to give the trial the green light.
By scheduling the trial for early March, the judge exacerbated the judicial bottleneck (inevitable because the other courts also have to oscillate between Trump’s election dates, but disastrous nonetheless). It will be a chaotic election season, with even the majority of Democrats deeming Biden in the polls too old to return to the White House, while Trump, who has seen his lead over his Republican opponents in the polls dwindling slightly for the first time since then, has shrunk slightly In the TV debate, he relies, he relies entirely, on the thesis of political and judicial persecution.