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Twin court rulings on Friday underscored how prosecutors’ carefully laid plans to put former President Donald Trump on trial have nearly all been upended with less than eight months until Election Day.
In each of Trump’s four criminal cases, from South Florida to Manhattan, Trump’s prosecutors have seemed to be on their heels of late, at the mercy of a dwindling 2024 calendar, adverse decisions from judges as well as missteps, miscalculations and just plain bad luck.
But the extent of the damage remains unclear, and it still seems conceivable Trump could face a jury in two or three of the cases before the year is out — though each day that passes without resolution makes cramming multiple trials into 2024 unlikely.
On Friday, Georgia prosecutors dodged a potentially devastating blow when the judge presiding over Trump’s state case there agreed not to banish lead prosecutor Fani Willis. Hours later in New York, where Trump was scheduled to go on trial in 10 days, a last-minute influx of documents from the Justice Department resulted in a delay of at least three weeks — and possibly more.
Here’s a look at some of the key questions hanging over Trump’s criminal cases as they enter a pivotal, compressed moment on the calendar:
Who will go first?
The case in Manhattan charging Trump with falsifying business records to cover up his hush money payments to women during the 2016 presidential campaign is still the top contender, although it’s no longer so clear a leader of the field.
In recent weeks, the March 25 trial date appeared more and more reliable, to the point where the other three cases seemed to be fading from contention. However, that changed late this week, after Trump and prosecutors from District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office said they needed additional time to review more than 100,000 pages of records recently turned over by federal prosecutors from their own probe of the same allegations (which led to the prosecution of Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, but didn’t result in charges against Trump).
As a result, the judge overseeing the case on Friday announced a trial delay until April 15 at the earliest, as well as a hearing on March 25 to discuss the dispute over the document production.
Even with that delay — a clear win for Trump — the former president is continuing to seek further delay or dismissal of the case for various reasons, including his argument that the trial shouldn’t proceed until after the Supreme Court decides his bid for “presidential immunity” in one of his other criminal cases.
Still, at the moment, the New York case — unlike the others — appears to stand a chance of going to trial this spring. So even with no set trial date at the moment, it remains the front-runner.
Could a Supreme Court ruling further upend the schedule?
Trump has raised claims to be immune from prosecution in all four cases, arguing that some actions he took as president — no matter how tangential to the alleged crimes — preclude him from charges and require the matters to be dismissed or that some evidence in the cases be ruled off limits.
The Supreme Court agreed to weigh in on the presidential immunity issue in the context of the federal prosecution Trump faces for seeking to subvert the 2020 election. The justices tacked the case onto their calendar next month for what are likely to be the final oral arguments of the term.
After that April session, the justices typically turn full-time to writing and announcing decisions. A ruling on the breadth of Trump’s presidential immunity could linger until the end of June, when the last opinions of the term traditionally emerge. The immunity ruling could reverberate in Trump’s other cases and once again force delays or changes to the charges themselves.
And though Trump’s lawyers have asked that the Manhattan case be put on hold until the Supreme Court rules, Justice Juan Merchan seems unlikely to grant a further continuance on that basis alone.
What’s taking so long in Florida
Two weeks ago, U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon held a lengthy hearing in her Fort Pierce, Florida, courtroom to discuss the timing of a potential trial in the case she’s overseeing where Trump is accused of hoarding classified documents at his Palm Beach estate and attempting to obstruct a federal investigation. At one point during the March 1 hearing, Cannon bristled at a prosecutor for what she took as a suggestion that she could be moving faster.
“I can assure you that, in the building, there’s a good deal of judicial work going on,” Cannon said.
Cannon, who was appointed to the federal bench by Trump in 2020, did convene another court session this week to hear arguments on two defense motions in the case, and she ruled on one of them. But there’s still no sign of a trial date. Prosecutors are urging a July 8 start — the week before Republicans’ national convention in Milwaukee. Trump’s lawyers pressed for a delay until next year, but later proposed Aug. 12.
However, as of this point, there isn’t even a schedule for arguments on a slew of other motions Trump’s attorneys have made to knock out the whole case and various parts of it. In fact, some of the motions aren’t even public due to an unresolved dispute about whether witness names should be excised from them first.
Could a New York delay benefit the Florida prosecution?
One possibility for the measured pace of the Florida case in recent days could be that Cannon was waiting to see whether the New York case — which was the first one filed — would actually get underway March 25.
Now, that date is officially off the table. One potential side effect of that delay is several weeks have suddenly opened up on the calendars of Trump and two of his attorneys involved in both the New York and Florida cases.
The reprieve for Trump in Manhattan could give Cannon some wiggle room to schedule hearings on the pretrial matters she has before her, although that might rankle the judge handling the case in New York.
In his Friday decision, Merchan wrote that his previous “directive that the parties, including the Defendant, not engage or otherwise enter into any commitment pending completion of this trial remains in effect.”
It’s not clear exactly what that means or whether the judge was intending to preclude or discourage the judges handling the other three cases against Trump from setting hearings before the New York case gets to trial.
Is there any chance the Georgia trial takes place before the election?
Trump’s prosecution in Atlanta on charges that he conspired with allies to corrupt the results of the 2020 election is the only one of his cases that has never had even a tentative trial date.
Though Judge Scott McAfee could have forced months of delay — or even the unraveling of the case altogether — if he had agreed to disqualify Willis over allegations of financial impropriety, the case is still wracked with turmoil and appears unlikely to be feasible in 2024.
Already, Trump’s trial in New York — estimated to take six weeks — seems likely to chew up the spring and early summer, and his federal cases in Florida and Washington, D.C., may wind up boxing out any chance of the Georgia case reaching a jury this year. That’s especially so because prosecutors have estimated it would take four months to present their case, which they long ago proposed taking to trial in August.
If Trump ends up winning the 2024 election, his attorneys have argued that it wouldn’t be legally permissible for his state trials to take place until after he leaves office in 2029.
