Despite What Republicans Say, Trump’s Legal Cases Aren’t a Distraction

“How does this indictment affect his candidacy?” Bill Hemmer, of Fox News, asked the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley last week. The candidacy in question was, of course, that of former President Donald Trump. The indictment being discussed was one that Trump, in a Truth Social post last week, said he expected any day after receiving a so-called target letter from the special counsel Jack Smith, on charges related to Trump’s actions in the prelude to the January 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol. It would be his third criminal indictment in about four months. And, Haley told Hemmer, “it’s going to keep on going. I mean, the rest of this primary election is going to be in reference to Trump, it’s going to be about lawsuits, it’s going to be about legal fees, it’s going to be about judges, and it’s just going to continue to be a further and further distraction.”

Haley is herself running for the Republican nomination, so perhaps what she means is that Trump’s legal troubles are a distraction from her own campaign, or from the picture she wishes voters had of the Republican Party. “We can’t keep dealing with this drama, we can’t keep dealing with the negativity,” she said. (One wonders how she managed to spend almost two years in Trump’s Cabinet, as the Ambassador to the United Nations.) And yet, in a crowded primary field, Trump is polling around fifty per cent, while his closest competitor, Ron DeSantis, comes in at roughly twenty. Haley is hovering at about five per cent, somewhere between Senator Tim Scott and former Vice-President Mike Pence. Trump, for all his drama, isn’t a distraction from what the G.O.P. is; in many ways, he is the G.O.P. And the various cases against Trump aren’t a distraction preventing people from assessing him. Instead, they provide an almost encyclopedic guide to his political and personal character.

Haley is right that the cases, criminal and civil, are going to keep on coming. The District of Columbia is where Smith is pursuing his January 6th case, while in Florida he has brought a thirty-eight-count indictment alleging that Trump, with the help of an employee, Waltine Nauta, retained sensitive documents in violation of the Espionage Act. (Trump and Nauta have pleaded not guilty.) Last Friday, Judge Aileen Cannon, who is presiding, set a trial date of May 20, 2024—a day before the Kentucky and the Oregon primaries. Trump’s lawyers had wanted to wait until after Election Day; prosecutors had hoped for this December, but conceded that the timing would be “aggressive,” in part because of the question of how classified evidence should be handled. Trump’s lawyers will need to obtain clearances before they can even look at some of the discovery material.

Making this all more complicated is the fact that, in Georgia, Fani Willis, the Fulton County District Attorney, appears to be close to indicting Trump in her own investigation of his efforts to overturn the 2020 vote. She is reportedly looking at state election and racketeering laws, while Smith, based on what’s known of the target letter, seems to be pursuing charges of fraud, obstructing an official proceeding, and the violation of a civil-rights statute. Willis won a victory last week when the Georgia Supreme Court turned down Trump’s request that it block her work because, in effect, he didn’t think she was being fair to him.

Judging from the witnesses who have been called, both Smith’s and Willis’s January 6th investigations are looking at the “fake electors scheme.” This was, allegedly, a Trump-team plan to introduce “alternative” slates of electors, when Congress assembled on January 6th, for a number of states that President Joe Biden won; Vice-President Pence would then refuse to count the real votes or, at least, adjourn the session, claiming that the states were in dispute. Pence didn’t go along with the scheme, but Trump partisans in several states went so far as to sign certificates falsely identifying themselves as the duly elected electors. The Attorney General of Michigan, Dana Nessel, indicted sixteen of these individuals last week, on charges of forgery. (Trump himself is not a defendant.) A parallel investigation is under way in Arizona.

In New York, Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan D.A., has indicted Trump on thirty-four counts of falsifying business records, related to his alleged payment of hush money to Stormy Daniels, the adult-film actress. (Trump has pleaded not guilty.) The trial is scheduled for March 25th—between the Louisiana and the Wisconsin primaries. New York is also the site of a number of civil cases in which Trump is embroiled, including a fraud suit brought by Attorney General Letitia James, which is slated to go to trial in October; and a second defamation suit brought by E. Jean Carroll (in the first case, Trump was also found liable for sexual abuse), with a trial date of January 15th.

The calendar is getting crowded. Perhaps January 6th trials in Georgia or D.C. can be squeezed in between the Florida trial and the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, in July. The one date that can’t be erased from Trump’s calendar is Election Day, at least not without the help of Republican primary voters. A felony conviction does not prevent anyone from running for the Presidency, or from winning it.

Putting a leading Presidential candidate on trial, or trials, ahead of an election is a risky endeavor. That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done; accountability matters. But it must be done well and as transparently as possible. Do it wrong and the public may become increasingly convinced that both the legal and the electoral systems have been hopelessly compromised; millions of Trump supporters already believe this to be the case. Republicans have been playing on that distrust to defend the former President. (Last week, Kevin McCarthy, the Speaker of the House, suggested that Trump’s target letter was distracting from a House hearing about Hunter Biden.)

Voters will have enough to do just keeping the various cases straight. We might need a good mnemonic to keep track of them all, or at least a map with a lot of pushpins. A summary of the most recent spate of legal news sounds like the recitation of a days-of-the-week nursery rhyme: Target letter Sunday; Georgia Supreme Court Monday; Florida hearing Tuesday; Hush-money ruling Wednesday. Soon, it may seem that every week has a frenzied agenda: Friday, say, a debate; Monday, a subpoena; Tuesday, a vote—or a verdict. ♦