Now that Donald Trump’s trial in New York is over, we look at his three other criminal cases to see which trial could be next. The short answer is that this probably won’t be the case before the November election, and we just got news in his other state case, in Georgia, that reaffirms this reality.
Neither the Georgia case nor the two federal cases have a trial date. The way U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon handled the secret documents case in Florida has all but guaranteed that a trial won’t happen there anytime soon. In the federal election interference case in Washington, we are still waiting for the Supreme Court’s ruling on Trump’s immunity claim, which has blocked this claim. The Supreme Court will make the next ruling on Thursday (we don’t know in advance which one), but the time the justices have taken with the immunity appeal may have already brought an election process to a standstill (although we will have to see what the outcome will be). opinion says when it will come and how quickly things will go afterwards).
In that Georgia news, we learned Monday that the appeals court has tentatively set an Oct. 4 hearing date on the defense’s attempt to fire the Fulton County district attorney. Fani Willis from Trump’s state election interference case. The judge, Scott McAfee, said in March that Willis could stay on the case if her special prosecutor resigned. So did the accuser, Nathan Wade, with whom Willis had a romantic relationship. But the defense still appealed McAfee’s ruling, arguing that the alleged conflict of interest had not yet been resolved and that the case itself should be dismissed.
In his March ruling, McAfee said there was no actual conflict of interest requiring disqualification, due to the lack of evidence that Willis had acquired a personal stake in the prosecution or that her financial arrangements had influenced the case. He also said dismissing the charges was inappropriate, in part because a less drastic solution was available. He concluded that although there was no actual conflict, an appearance of impropriety required either Willis or Wade to go, effectively kicking Wade off the case.
McAfee also declined to disqualify Willis based on a speech she gave, despite the judge ruling that its effect “was to racially criticize an accused suspect’s decision to file this preliminary investigation.” The defense disqualification effort was led by counsel for Trump co-defendant Michael Roman, who was also just indicted in Wisconsin state court in connection with alleged subversion of the 2020 election.
McAfee noted that the law on the subject in Georgia is not clear, making it unsurprising that the state’s appeals court agreed to consider the defense’s appeal. And even before this latest news, a Trump election trial in Georgia seemed unlikely.
So the key question is whether Willis and her office can continue to hear the case — or whether the appeals court will go further than McAfee by reaching different legal conclusions than he did based on the facts he found. We may not know the answer until next year, making the issue less a matter of precise timing than of the fate of the case itself. If Willis and her office are disqualified, a new agency or prosecutor would have to be appointed by a state panel, which would at least further delay the complex case with multiple suspects.
If Trump wins the White House in November, he will likely use his presidential power to dismiss his federal cases, putting even more emphasis on the prosecution in Georgia because presidents cannot dismiss or pardon state cases. The presumptive Republican nominee’s state case in New York, for which he will be sentenced on July 11, will likely be his only criminal trial before the election. How this appeal is handled in Georgia could determine whether it is his only other criminal trial that will ever take place, or at least how far into the future it will take place.
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This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
