Donald Trump’s lawyers have already begun sounding out what the former president’s defense is going to be to charges that he tried to subvert the will of voters and prevent the peaceful transfer of power to Joe Biden.
His assertion that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him is speech protected by the First Amendment, they’ll argue. Trump likely will also claim he indeed believed he was the victim of election fraud, even if that notion was wholly baseless. And he might chalk up his actions to bad postelection advice from his lawyers.
No one would be surprised, however, if the anchor to his defense turned out to be an all-out effort to stall, delay, drag out. If Trump were to win the 2024 election before trial, he could effectively shut down the federal cases pending against him and could in turn show special counsel Jack Smith the door.
Consider what one of Trump’s lawyers, John Lauro, said during an interview on NBC’s “Today” show Aug. 2. Smith had more than three years to build a case against Trump, so why can’t Trump have the same amount of time to craft a defense?
“Why don’t we make it equal?” Lauro told NBC’s Savannah Guthrie. “The bottom line is that they have 60 federal agents working on this. Sixty lawyers, all kinds of government personnel, and we get this indictment and they want to go to trial in 90 days. Does that sound like justice to you?”
The former president is entitled to ample time to build his defense in this latest indictment, and in previous charges in New York relating to hush payments made to a pornographic actress and charges in Florida that he illegally kept classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago resort and tried to prevent the federal government from getting them back.
That’s due process, and like any other criminal defendant, Trump deserves a right to fair trial and the right to get up to speed with every facet of the prosecution’s case against him, no matter how voluminous that case is.
That doesn’t mean, however, that Trump gets to forestall justice by churning out a series of delay tactics aimed at running out the clock. In the case revolving around Trump’s attempts to subvert the 2020 election, it’s on U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan’s shoulders to ensure that the former president doesn’t stall his way out of a verdict.
Chutkan has yet to set a trial date. Appointed to the federal bench by Barack Obama, the 61-year-old jurist is an experienced trial judge with a reputation for meting out tough sentences for individuals convicted in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. We believe she has the right perspective on the events of that horrible day. In handing down a tough sentence on one of the rioters in the fall of 2021, Chutkan said, “The country is watching to see what the consequences are,” adding, “There have to be consequences.”
Trump has pleaded not guilty to the latest charges and to charges in the previous two indictments. Like any defendant, he is presumed innocent. We’re confident Chutkan will oversee this trial fairly — and just as important, expeditiously.
A complicating factor in the proceedings surrounding all three cases is the fact that Trump is a candidate for the GOP presidential nomination who, as it stands now, leads in the polls by a wide margin. Moreover, it’s possible scheduling might be made even messier by a fourth indictment: Prosecutors in Fulton County, Georgia, are looking into whether Trump should be charged for his alleged role in trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
Chutkan, however, should not concern herself with Trump’s campaign schedule. Nor should any other judge presiding over a criminal case against the former president. Judges in these cases against Trump have a single, paramount assignment — ensuring that justice occurs fairly and unimpeded. That means resisting any ham-handed attempt by Trump’s lawyers to stave off trial proceedings.
Succumbing to such attempts could allow Trump to sidestep accountability — an unspeakable prospect given the sheer contempt that the former president displayed for this nation’s democratic ideals in the weeks leading up to Jan. 6, and on that day.
There’s another reason why the trials Trump faces, particularly the election subversion charges, should be firewalled from any Trump team stalling.
If Trump is guilty of attempting to undermine democracy, Americans should know that before they vote in the 2024 presidential election. It’s hard to imagine anything more disqualifying or more antithetical to what it means to be president than that.
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