Stalling: a time-tested legal strategy that works for Trump
Trial dates still to be set in his 4 criminal cases
The schedule seemed stacked against Donald Trump: four criminal trials in four cities, all in the same year he is running for president.
But rather than doom Trump, the chaotic calendar might just save him.
Trump, who as president helped reshape the federal judiciary, has already persuaded the Supreme Court to delay his trial in Washington. His lawyers have buried judges in Florida and Georgia in enough legal motions and procedural complaints that his cases there have no set trial dates, either.
The case in New York, where Trump is accused of covering up a sex scandal during and after the 2016 presidential campaign, was the only one not mired in potential postponements.
Until now.
On Friday, Justice Juan M. Merchan, who is overseeing the case, delayed the trial at least three weeks, until mid-April.
It was hardly the first case to be delayed during Trump’s recent run of legal problems — and that is no accident. As the former president attempts to push each of his trials until after the election, he is relying on his most battle-tested strategy: Seek every delay available within the law.
The postponement of the New York trial — the first prosecution of a former American president — stems from the recent disclosure of more than 100,000 pages of investigative records that may have some bearing on the case. Citing the records, Trump’s lawyers sought a 90-day delay of the trial, while the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, proposed a delay of up to 30 days.
The delay in New York also came on the same day that Trump’s other state case — in Georgia, where he has been accused of tampering with the results of that state’s 2020 election results — had its own tumultuous development: One of the proceeding’s top prosecutors, who had a romantic relationship with the district attorney who filed the indictment, decided to step down after a judge decided that one of them had to go.
The day’s events showed that the cases, accusing Trump of a remarkable array of crimes, will slog on, even as the former president continues to drag his feet.
When facing legal woes, as he has for decades in civil courts, Trump seeks to manipulate the schedule. Whether or not the facts are in his favor, he plays a game of calendar calculus to pit one case against the other, in hopes of pushing them past the election.
If he wins, the cases would have to pause once he took office. It is long-standing policy that a sitting president cannot face trial on criminal charges.
Until the election, his goal appears to be to manufacture the prosecutorial equivalent of a four-car pileup at the busiest legal intersection in America. And despite Trump’s laments about a cabal of deep-state liberal prosecutors putting their heads together to conspire against him, the reality is that there is no single cop directing traffic.
Trump has exploited that gap, proposing delays in one case that have ultimately affected other cases and assigning the same lawyers to multiple matters, only to then turn around and argue that their schedules conflict.
While Trump began the year facing the daunting prospect of trials in at least two of his criminal cases before the election — not to mention a pair of civil trials that delivered a devastating financial blow to the former president — the only date on his legal docket now is “to be determined.”
William W. Taylor III, a veteran white-collar defense attorney in Washington, D.C., who has handled cases in federal and state court around the country, said that Trump was hardly the only defendant who wanted to delay a trial.
“Anybody who’s got four criminal cases to contend with has four serious problems,” he said. “The last thing you want to do if you’re in the position of being a defendant in those things is to have any of them be resolved.” If the Supreme Court rules in June, as expected, Trump’s federal criminal case in Washington, where he is accused of plotting to overturn the 2020 election, could in theory go to trial around September. But if that happens, there is no guarantee that the jury hearing the case would render a verdict before the election in November.
Trump’s case in Georgia on charges of tampering with that state’s election is also in flux — albeit for different reasons. On Friday, the judge overseeing the matter declined to remove Fani Willis, the Fulton County district attorney, from the case, so long as Nathan Wade, the deputy she had a relationship with, stepped down.
Wade did exactly that, staving off a legal disaster. While his decision is likely to allow the case to move forward, it could easily prove beneficial to Trump’s effort to discredit it politically.
The weeks spent gathering evidence about Willis’s relationship with the deputy, Nathan Wade, also burned up precious time in a case that she would like to take in front of a jury in August. The judge in the case, Scott McAfee, has not weighed in on when he wants the trial to begin.
There is also no firm trial date in Trump’s classified document case in Florida. While the judge overseeing the matter, Aileen Cannon, is slowly pushing it forward — she denied one of Trump’s motions to dismiss the case Thursday — she has not yet said when the trial will begin, even though she held a hearing two weeks ago specifically to decide that very question.
Two of Trump’s lawyers, Todd Blanche and Emil Bove, are representing him in both New York and Florida, and they have sought to play the two cases against each other, complaining to Cannon that their client would be hard-pressed to attend a trial in one place while attending hearings in another.
For months, the New York case seemed immune from Trump’s delay tactics.
Last month, when Merchan convened a hearing to set the trial date, Trump’s legal team pleaded for a delay. Blanche called the schedule “unfathomable,” arguing that “we are in the middle of primary season.”
Merchan was unmoved. At one point, the judge instructed Blanche to “stop interrupting me, please,” and to “tell me something you haven’t already said today.”
He set the trial for March 25. But soon after the hearing, the new stack of records appeared. They came courtesy of federal prosecutors at the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, which had previously investigated a hushmoney payment at the center of Bragg’s case against Trump.
Bragg’s prosecutors had requested records from the Southern District last year, and had received some, but not all, of what they sought.
Then, in January, Trump’s lawyers subpoenaed the Southern District, which in turn produced over 100,000 pages of records, giving them to both the defense and the prosecution earlier this month. Only a subset of those records are thought to be relevant to the case.
It is unclear why the federal prosecutors did not give the district attorney, a close law enforcement partner, all of the material sooner. But the Southern District is so fiercely independent that it is known in prosecutorial circles as the sovereign district of New York.
The delay was orchestrated by Trump, the prosecutors contend. He failed to request the records from the Southern District until January — nearly nine months after he was indicted. And, according to Bragg’s office, Trump “consented to repeated extensions of the deadline” for the Southern District.
While Trump’s lawyers recently asked Merchan to throw out the case because, they asserted, prosecutors had failed to turn over relevant documents, any lag in turning over records, Bragg wrote, “is a result solely of defendant’s delay.”
‘The last thing you want to do if you’re . . . a defendant in [criminal cases] is to have any of them be resolved.’
WILLIAM W. TAYLOR III, defense attorney in Washington, D.C.