Former President Donald Trump was dealt two major setbacks Thursday in his efforts to derail the criminal cases against him, with judges in the Georgia election interference case and in the federal classified documents case both rejecting bids by the presumptive 2024 GOP presidential nominee to have those cases thrown out.
The judges in both cases have yet to decide other requests put forward by Trump seeking the dismissal of the Georgia and federal prosecutions, which were brought by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and special counsel Jack Smith, respectively. But for now, the prospect of the cases eventually going before juries remains alive, and a trial in a third criminal prosecution against Trump – the 2016 campaign hush money case brought in New York – is on track to start this month.
The New York case aside, the likelihood that the other prosecutions against Trump – which also include a federal election subversion case brought in Washington, DC, by the special counsel – will go to trial before the November election is very much still in the air. Delay has been a key part of the former president’s strategy, and he has had considerable success in prolonging the pretrial litigation in the prosecutions against him. The DC case, which at one point was moving the most quickly among all the Trump criminal cases, is now on hold while the Supreme Court considers whether Trump’s status as a former president grants him immunity from those criminal charges. Those arguments are scheduled for this month.
Trump has made similar presidential immunity arguments in the Georgia case and in the classified documents case. He has pleaded not guilty in all four criminal cases.
In the classified documents case, which is proceeding in south Florida, US District Judge Aileen Cannon on Thursday declined Trump’s…
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