After being convicted in a Manhattan courtroom, the former president still faces charges in three criminal prosecutions, all of which are tangled up in procedural delays.
Former President Donald Trump at Trump Tower on Friday, after being convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to cover up a sex scandal.Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times
Former President Donald J. Trump’s criminal trial in Manhattan came to an end this week when a jury found him guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records in an effort to cover up a sex scandal that threatened to upset his 2016 presidential campaign.
But Mr. Trump is still facing federal charges, brought by a special counsel, in two cases: one in Florida, where he is accused of illegally holding on to classified documents after leaving office and obstructing government efforts to retrieve them, and one in Washington, D.C., where he’s accused of plotting to overturn the results of the 2020 election. He faces similar election-tampering charges in a third case brought by a local prosecutor in Georgia.
The proceedings — all of which are bogged down in delays — can be confusing to keep track of. Here are updates on where each of them stands.
Federal Documents Case
In this case, Mr. Trump is accused of illegally holding on to a large amount of sensitive national security material after leaving office and then plotting to obstruct repeated efforts by the government to get it back. The charges were brought by Jack Smith, the special counsel appointed to oversee the federal investigations into Mr. Trump.
The case is tied up in efforts by Mr. Trump’s lawyers to have the charges against him dismissed before they go to trial. To that end, the lawyers have filed a barrage of motions attacking the indictment on a number of grounds. Those include claims that Mr. Smith was improperly appointed to his job and that he filed the charges as part of a politicized effort to harm Mr. Trump.
Judge Aileen M. Cannon, who is overseeing the case, recently scrapped the trial’s start date — it had been set to begin in May — and has not yet scheduled a new one. In doing so, she cited the “myriad and interconnected” legal issues she has yet to resolve.
It appears increasingly unlikely that the case will go in front of a jury before the election in November. That is largely because of Judge Cannon’s habit of holding time-consuming hearings on arguments raised by the defense that many other judges would have decided on the merits of written filings.
Should Mr. Trump be elected, he could seek to have his Justice Department dismiss the charges. Even without that step, department policy forbids prosecuting a sitting president.
Federal Election Subversion Case
Last summer, Mr. Smith charged Mr. Trump with conspiring to subvert democracy and stay in power against the will of voters following his loss in the 2020 election.
The case has been frozen in place since early December as a series of courts in Washington have considered an expansive and novel claim he has raised in his own defense: that he is immune to all of the charges in the indictment because they arose from official acts he took while he was president.
In a few weeks, the Supreme Court is expected to render a final decision on the question of immunity, and the ruling by the justices will go a long way in determining whether the case will go to trial sooner rather than later.
There is a narrow path for a trial to be held before November. But it is probably more likely that the case will be sent back to the district court judge, Tanya S. Chutkan, to determine which of the charges stemmed from official acts and which should be thought of as strictly private ones. That process, which could affect the scope of the charges a jury ends up hearing, could take weeks or even months to complete.
The Supreme Court is expected to rule soon on another case that could affect the scope and timing of the election interference prosecution. That case concerns the viability of a federal obstruction law that prosecutors have used to accuse Mr. Trump of encouraging a mob of his supporters to disrupt the certification of the election that took place at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Georgia Election Case
Mr. Trump and 18 of his allies were indicted in Fulton County, Ga., last August, in a broad election interference case. The case was brought by the Fulton County district attorney, Fani T. Willis.
But the complex racketeering case is highly unlikely to go to trial this year. Part of the delay stems from recent revelations of an affair between Ms. Willis and the lawyer she hired to run the case, Nathan Wade. Defense lawyers said it created an untenable conflict of interest.
The presiding judge, Scott McAfee, held a number of hearings on the topic earlier this year, but ultimately decided not to disqualify Ms. Willis, as long as Mr. Wade stepped aside, which he did.
Those hearings are hardly the only matter weighing on the case. Dozens of pretrial motions have yet to be resolved, including recent sparring over the precedent in a legal case from the 1890s. Then there are appeals. Defense lawyers have appealed the disqualification decision to the Georgia Court of Appeals, while Ms. Willis’s office has appealed Judge McAfee’s decision to quash a few charges.
Legal observers think a trial is likely to take place sometime next year, but if Mr. Trump is elected president, it may take place without him. Whether a sitting president can be tried in a state court is an untested legal matter that is sure to be fought out in higher courts.
Four of the 19 original defendants have already pleaded guilty and taken deals with the prosecution, including Sidney Powell, once one of Mr. Trump’s most vocal and outspoken defenders, and Kenneth Chesebro, a legal architect of the plan to deploy fake electors who has become a witness in five different state election inquiries.
Jenna Ellis, another defendant and a former Trump lawyer, said in court during her tearful guilty plea: “If I knew then what I know now, I would have declined to represent Donald Trump in these postelection challenges,” adding, “I look back on this experience with deep remorse.”
