Please don’t expect the law to save America from Donald Trump. Not for the first time, he is proving to be a talented escapologist. I always doubted that Trump would be locked up by the next presidential election but the most serious criminal cases against him may not even reach trial by November 4. One by one, the bulwarks against his return to power are toppling.
This week marks a critical juncture in the series of Trump trials. Tomorrow, the former president is expected to appear in a New York court in the hope of persuading a judge to dismiss charges that he paid hush money to porn star Stormy Daniels during the 2016 election. He claims that the case brought by Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg is a naked attempt to interfere in his latest presidential campaign.
Trump intends to play the victim by claiming Daniels — or “Horseface” as he gallantly calls her — was attempting to extort money
Yet if Trump’s bid fails and the judge sets an early date for trial, legal experts think it is the weakest of the four criminal cases against him, more deserving of a misdemeanour than a crime. Trump intends to play the victim by claiming Daniels — or “Horseface” as he gallantly calls her — was attempting to extort money.
He will also float the “Melania defence”, claiming that he was merely trying to protect his wife from embarrassing allegations that he slept with a porn star only four months after she gave birth to Barron, now 17. He has a point. If Melania has forgiven him after all these years, who are we to judge?
Simultaneously, an astonishing court drama is unfolding in Atlanta, where Trump faces sprawling charges of obstructing the last election, brought under ambitious racketeering laws by Fani Willis, district attorney for Fulton County, Georgia.
In an act of monumental political stupidity, it has emerged that she is sleeping with Nathan Wade, a relatively inexperienced suburban defence lawyer whom she appointed as a lead prosecutor against Trump and has been paid a handsome $653,000 to date for his work. What was she thinking, I hear you scream?
She is now in danger of being thrown off the case by Fulton County judge Scott McAfee, who has demanded that she accounts for her behaviour at a hearing tomorrow.
“I think it’s perfectly clear that disqualification can occur if evidence is produced demonstrating an actual conflict, or the appearance of one,” McAfee warned this week. Willis claims the affair only started after she appointed Wade, but lawyers for Trump and his co-defendants say they have a witness to the contrary as well as plane and hotel receipts.
Willis has hinted that the accusations are racially motivated as she and Wade are black, an inflammatory charge. “I’m just asking, God, is it that some will never see a black man as qualified, no matter his achievements?” she vented at an Atlanta church ahead of Martin Luther King Day last month.
The Hollywood star Barbra Streisand has sprung to her defence, tweeting on X: “How silly that Republicans want to have Fani Willis fired. For what? Thinking a woman can’t have a private life as well as a professional one? Men do it all the time! How ridiculous is this?”
But the “optics”, as every Democrat privately admits, are bad. The claims have nothing to do with race or gender. In fact by her own standards, Willis ought to be toast. When she was campaigning to be district attorney in 2020, she promised: “I will certainly not be choosing to date people that work under me.”
Trump is exultant at this stroke of luck. He wanted to appear in Atlanta tomorrow to stare down Willis in person — much as when he brought Bill Clinton’s alleged mistresses to his televised debate with Hillary in 2016. At a rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, yesterday, he upped the stakes by mocking Willis’s name. “How do you pronounce Fani — FAAAHNY,” he scoffed.
“She had an affair and they paid the guy almost a million dollars!” Moreover, if Willis were to be barred from the case, it could lead to the dismissal of her entire team. Her replacement as prosecutor would have to delay Trump’s trial by months if not years, and could reduce or drop the charges. Yet if she clings on as prosecutor, she will be damaged goods.
All hopes now rest on the federal case brought by special counsel Jack Smith against Trump for attempting to obstruct the election before and during the January 6 Capitol riot. This trial was pencilled in for next month, but the date keeps slipping. On Monday, Trump lodged an appeal with the supreme court to toss out the case on the grounds that presidents have absolute immunity from prosecution.
The court, even one packed to the gills with Trump nominees, is unlikely to agree to such a far-fetched theory, but they are not obliged to hear the case promptly. The best case scenario for Smith is that they decline to take it, leaving a recent appeals court judgment against presidential immunity to stand.
What about Smith’s other case against Trump for allegedly concealing classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago resort? This was supposed to result in a slam-dunk guilty verdict. How we laughed at the stack of files marked “top secret” concealed in Trump’s shower.
But then came special counsel Robert Hur’s excruciating verdict on Joe Biden’s retention of classified papers last week. This cleared the 81-year-old president of similar charges on the comically brutal grounds that he was an “elderly man with a poor memory”, who couldn’t recall when he was vice-president or when his much-loved son Beau died, let alone why he had stashed his own pile of mouldering documents next to a dog crate, a dog bed, an empty bucket and broken lamp in his garage.
Trump, 77, naturally crowed that Biden’s case was “100 times different and more severe than mine”. On Monday, he attended a closed-doors hearing with Aileen Cannon, a Florida judge whom he appointed. She is weighing his lawyers’ request to delay matters beyond the next election. Whatever happens, she is in no hurry.
So here is where things stand regarding the four criminal trials. The Daniels case will at most result in a fine. The Georgia case is threatened by Willis’s misconduct. And if Trump wins re-election before Smith can bring him to court, the Justice Department can make the two federal cases against him disappear.
Trump’s civil liabilities still have the power to sting. He has vowed to appeal the $83.3 million in punitive damages for defaming agony aunt E Jean Carroll after sexually assaulting her in the Nineties, but may not get far. This Friday we are likely to hear from Judge Arthur Engoron about Trump’s fine for inflating the price of his properties in New York. He may even bar Trump from conducting business in the state.
But the polls show most people care only about criminal convictions against Trump — and frankly not by much. If Biden wants to win, there is no point waiting for the law to step in. The voters are going to have to do the job.
