Donald Trump has a busy schedule for the next year. He is the frontrunner for the Republican nomination for president, yet he is ensnared in a legal thicket. He may be out in front in the polls, but his congested litigation schedule is so challenging that it would verge on something out of the multiverse.
The Sixth Amendment to the Constitution guarantees the accused in criminal prosecutions the right to a “speedy trial.” Trump has this right, but obviously doesn’t want it. In Judge Tanya Chutkan’s federal court in Washington, D.C., he asked for a trial date in April 2026 — sometime between later and never. Judge Chutkan instead fixed the date at March 4, 2024, the day before “Super Tuesday” in the Republican primaries.
Courts have by extension guaranteed the speedy trial right to the public, which, as Judge Chutkan noted, also has a strong interest in a speedy trial of our former president. And the public wants to get this nightmare behind us.
While technically qualified under the Constitution to resume his presidency, no candidate of a major party has ever been an indicted felon; if all goes according to plan, Trump may be a convicted felon as well. (Eugene V. Debs ran from jail as a Socialist in 1920, but that is a precedent that doesn’t stand for very much.)
In case your head is spinning, here’s the legal situation Trump confronts:
There are four criminal cases naming Donald Trump as a defendant, totaling 91 felony counts — 44 federal and 47 state charges. In addition, there is the serious civil litigation, inevitably to be brought sometime soon, that he is disqualified from holding public office by reason of Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which disqualifies a former officeholder who has participated in an insurrection or rebellion against the United States from public office.
Then there are two civil cases bedeviling Trump: the suit by New York Attorney General Letitia James, charging him with fraud; and the second defamation suit brought by journalist E. Jean Carroll in the New York federal court, in which he called her a liar for accusing him of rape.
The criminal cases would normally require his physical presence at trial, the civil cases would not. The federal cases will not be televised; the state trial in Georgia will be televised, while the state cases in New York will not.
First and foremost of Trump’s legal difficulties is the January 6 election case brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith and pending before Judge Chutkan. Here, Trump is alleged to have participated in three conspiracies to overturn the 2020 election. The basic acts alleged in the indictment are by now well known by virtue of the solid work of the January 6 Select Committee. Trump’s lawyers tried to argue that there have already been 12.8 million pages of discovery produced (with more coming), which they will have only six months to digest, but the task is less daunting than they depict. Theatrics aside, there are no substantive reasons his team can’t be ready.
The second federal case is the Florida Mar-a-Lago documents case, with 40 counts and three defendants. The trial has been set for May 20, 2024, but may have to be postponed because of the complex discovery involved in the case. This is perhaps the most difficult case for a speedy trial, in that 32 of the 40 counts naming Trump relate to classified materials, with the remainder alleging obstruction of justice in attempting to keep subpoenaed documents away from the FBI and the grand jury.
Pretrial proceedings in this case may be more arcane than the others, since much of the evidence contains classified markings and will need to be screened under the Classified Information Procedures Act (CIPA). According to the government, there are a million pages of discovery to be reviewed, including at least 1,545 pages of documents with classified markings seized at the Mar-a-Lago estate, only 36 of which are mentioned in the indictment. The classified documents must be sanitized through an elaborate procedure provided by CIPA that requires the parties and the court to come together on dealing with the documents in question.
Under the statute, the court must balance the government’s interest in national security and the defendant’s due process right to be confronted with the evidence against him. All this takes time, and Cannon, who has never presided over a CIPA trial, has already ruled that this is a “complex case.”
The most dangerous case from Trump’s point of view may be the Georgia election case brought by prosecutor Fani Willis, because Trump could not be pardoned by a president for a state offense. The sprawling Georgia case, naming Trump in 13 counts along with 18 co-defendants, invokes the state RICO law, and largely tracks the federal case, featuring the fake electors scheme and the famous taped telephone conversation with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in which Trump asked Raffensperger to “find” 11,780 votes — one more than needed to carry the state.
A number of co-defendants have already upset Trump’s apple cart. Trump again would seek to delay trial as long as possible, but defendants Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro have moved for a speedy trial, and the judge has obliged them with a trial date of October 23. Defendant John Eastman has said he will follow suit. Whether the entire case will be tried in October, or just the cases against these defendants, remains to be seen.
Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows has also parted company with Trump by seeking to remove his Georgia case to the federal court. Meadows testified at a hearing on the matter before Federal Judge Steve Jones, and Jones will have to decide whether some or all of the case belongs in the federal court. Is Meadows carrying Trump’s water here? We will have to see how it all plays out.
Finally, there is the Stormy Daniels hush money case in New York. Trial had been scheduled for March 25, but District Attorney Alvin Bragg has said he is willing to be flexible, and try to accommodate the conflict with the federal trial beginning March 4 in Washington.
James D. Zirin, author, and legal analyst, is a former federal prosecutor in New York’s Southern District. He is also the host of the acclaimed public television talk show and podcast Conversations with Jim Zirin.