We got a taste Thursday of what former president Donald Trump\u2019s jam-packed legal schedule could look like in the coming months, with a split-screen of key hearings in Trump\u2019s Georgia and New York criminal cases playing out.<\/p>\n
In Georgia, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis testified in a hearing about whether she can be disqualified from her election-subversion prosecution of Trump. In New York, a hearing got the ball rolling on the hush-money trial that is set to begin next month.<\/p>\n
Below are some takeaways from the dueling courtroom scenes.<\/p>\n
While not surprising, the most definitive news Thursday was confirmation that a former president will, for the first time in history, go on trial facing criminal charges next month \u2014 and that he\u2019ll do so during his campaign for a second term.<\/p>\n
In the 2016 hush-money case, New York state Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan turned aside requests from Trump\u2019s legal team to delay the March 25 start of the trial. Merchan reiterated that it is a \u201cdate certain.\u201d<\/p>\n
The news is significant because the timing of Trump\u2019s three other criminal trials remain uncertain, with one or more potentially landing after the 2024 election, depending upon Trump\u2019s ability to delay them, or even being derailed altogether.<\/p>\n
The judge has estimated the trial would take about six weeks, meaning we could have a verdict in Trump\u2019s first criminal trial by early May.<\/p>\n
(Some of this is subject to change if Trump\u2019s federal election-subversion trial can be scheduled \u2014 and if New York would defer. The federal trial was initially scheduled for next month but is in flux due to a dispute over presidential immunity, which could go to the Supreme Court.)<\/p>\n
While Trump critics might rejoice that he will face at least some criminal accountability this year, the New York case is generally regarded as being the lowest-profile \u2014 and perhaps the weakest \u2014 of the four.<\/p>\n
Thursday was not a great day for the Fulton County prosecution or for Willis, whose testimony quickly turned combative.<\/p>\n
Whether that means she\u2019ll actually be disqualified from the case and\/or the case will be sidetracked is another question entirely. The judge has yet to rule on that, with hours left of the hearing set for Friday.<\/p>\n
The crux of the hearing is whether Willis improperly benefited from a personal romantic relationship with the prosecutor, Nathan Wade, whom she hired to lead the case. The two key issues were whether Wade\u2019s and Willis\u2019s relationship predated his hiring, and whether she financially benefited from hiring him because he paid for their vacations.<\/p>\n
In the first dispute, Willis\u2019s estranged friend and former colleague Robin Bryan-Yeartie contradicted a sworn affidavit from Wade that Willis\u2019s team filed earlier this month. Wade had said his relationship with Willis began in 2022 \u2014 after Willis hired him in late 2021 \u2014 but Bryan-Yeartie testified that it actually began in late 2019. Wade doubled down in his own later testimony, placing the start of the romantic relationship in March 2022. Willis put it around April 2022.<\/p>\n
In the second dispute, Wade and Willis testified that while he initially paid for the vacations, she repaid him in cash for about half the cost of the trips \u2014 an assertion that, if true, would undercut the idea that his hiring benefited her. Defense lawyers sought to cast doubt on that explanation, pressing Wade and Willis on the lack of documentation for the cash reimbursements and casting the thousands of dollars involved as large sums of cash to be holding. Willis said she keeps significant sums of cash on hand, citing advice she once received from her father.<\/p>\n
Related to the above disputes, defense lawyers also sought to cast Wade\u2019s candor into question and argue that he and Willis hid their relationship. They pointed to filings from Wade\u2019s recently concluded divorce proceedings in which Wade said he didn\u2019t have \u201csexual relationships\u201d with a person besides his wife during their marriage or period of separation.<\/p>\n
One such filing was made in May 2023, after Wade acknowledges his romantic relationship with Willis began and they had a sexual relationship. Wade later amended these forms, declining to answer the question by citing privacy protections in Georgia law.<\/p>\n
Wade cast his marriage as having effectively ended in 2015 \u2014 that he and his wife stayed together for years for their young children \u2014 and thus argued his relationship with Willis didn\u2019t constitute an affair. But defense lawyers emphasized that the question he had answered in the earlier filing included the period of separation.<\/p>\n
Willis\u2019s relationship with a prosecutor would seem to raise questions about her judgment. And defense lawyers got traction in casting doubt on Wade\u2019s honesty about the relationship.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a public relations problem, at the very least. That\u2019s especially given Willis was previously disqualified from investigating a politician in a related case after holding a fundraiser for his campaign opponent. (\u201cIt\u2019s a \u2018What are you thinking?\u2019 moment,\u201d the judge in that case said in July 2022. \u201cThe optics are horrific.\u201d)<\/p>\n
But when it comes to Willis\u2019s ability to continue the prosecution, the burden is on the defense team to prove Willis personally benefited from hiring Wade and that it is disqualifying, which proved more of a struggle Thursday.<\/p>\n
Were Willis removed, a state council that oversees prosecutors could select a replacement. But that process could take a while.<\/p>\n
Willis\u2019s display was a sight to behold. After Wade delivered brief answers during his testimony, she gave long answers that went after her critics, tried to reframe the questions she faced, and offered asides that made clear her disgust.<\/p>\n
She said early on that she was \u201csurprised\u201d the hearing was allowed to continue, citing the \u201clies\u201d that were being told. She told a defense lawyer \u201cdon\u2019t be cute with me\u201d and repeatedly urged one who spoke loudly to stop \u201cyelling\u201d at her. When one pointed to her allegedly reimbursing Wade even when she faced a tax lien, she said, \u201cAre you going to tell me how I\u2019m going to pay my bills?\u201d She added, defiantly: \u201cI went shopping too when I didn\u2019t pay it off.\u201d<\/p>\n
On the one hand, it signaled someone who clearly wasn\u2019t prepared to back down and seemed to be girding for the fights that await. On the other, it showed how Trump and his co-defendants \u2014 perhaps more than ever before, and after lots of trying \u2014 had succeeded in making a prosecutor the issue, with an assist from Willis and Wade.<\/p>\n
So many of Trump\u2019s tactics in these cases should be viewed as gamesmanship. By casting these prosecutions as political witch hunts and attacking judicial officers and others, he wants to insulate himself politically even from adverse verdicts and make his critics regret going after him.<\/p>\n
On Thursday, that tactic at the very least succeeded in putting a prosecutor under the microscope.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou think I\u2019m on trial,\u201d Willis told a defense lawyer at one point. \u201cThese people are on trial for trying to steal an election in 2020.\u201d<\/p>\n
She added: \u201cI\u2019m not on trial, no matter how hard you try to put me on trial.\u201d<\/p>\n
Any trial that involves Trump is bound to turn into a spectacle. And Thursday indicated that won\u2019t just be the case in his appearances outside the courthouse.<\/p>\n
The New York hearing, which Trump attended, featured some scenes in which Trump\u2019s defense lawyer took a page out of his book.<\/p>\n
In once instance, Trump lawyer Todd Blanche complained, \u201cPresident Trump is going to now spend the next two months working on this trial instead of out on the campaign trail,\u201d adding that it \u201cis something that should not happen in this country.\u201d<\/p>\n
Merchan asked him what his actual legal argument was, to which Blanche replied, \u201cThat is my legal argument.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThat is not a legal argument,\u201d Merchan responded.<\/p>\n
Blanche also claimed it was \u201ccompletely election interference\u201d for Trump to stand trial. And when prosecutors said they wanted to ask potential jurors whether they believe the 2020 election was stolen, Blanche responded that \u201cover half the population of this country believes the election was stolen.\u201d This is not true. (A majority of Republicans believe that.)<\/p>\n
The display echoed some of the scenes from Trump\u2019s civil trials, in which Trump\u2019s lawyers sometimes sounded like they were channeling their boss and making a campaign case rather than a legal one.<\/p>\n
In those cases, of course, it was Trump\u2019s money and business that were at stake. Thursday suggested the approach will linger even with his freedom at stake.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
We got a taste Thursday of what former president Donald Trump\u2019s jam-packed legal schedule could look like in the coming months, with a split-screen of key hearings in Trump\u2019s Georgia and New York criminal cases playing out. In Georgia, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis testified in a hearing about whether she can be disqualified […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":1121,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1120","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1120","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1120"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1120\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1121"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1120"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1120"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1120"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}