Democrats perturbed about Donald Trump’s lead in 2024 polling have long had a comforting hope to fall back on: that Trump, who is facing four criminal prosecutions, will likely become a convicted felon before election day — or even be sent to prison.
That’s still possible — but it’s not as sure a bet as it once seemed.
Delays have piled up in federal court proceedings in the District of Columbia case about Trump’s attempt to steal the 2020 election and the Florida classified documents case against Trump, making it unclear whether either case will go to trial before November. (For the DC case, the hold-up is higher-court appeals; for Florida, it’s a slow-walking judge.)
Meanwhile, the Georgia election case has recently been consumed by scandalous allegations about Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, which throw the future of that prosecution into question. A judge will soon consider whether Willis and her office should be disqualified. He could decide not to do that, but even then, a trial date has not yet been set in the complex case.
That leaves the New York hush money case as the only trial that still seems on track. It’s currently scheduled to begin on March 25 — but first, on February 15, a judge will consider whether the felony charges against Trump there are legal.
The upshot is that Trump’s only trial this year could end up being the New York one — the least substantively significant of the four. The charges are about whether Trump improperly logged Trump Organization payments to his then-attorney Michael Cohen as legal expenses, when they were reimbursements for hush money Cohen paid Stormy Daniels. It’s shady behavior, but it’s not exactly at the level of stealing an election or jeopardizing national security secrets.
Yet there’s little that can be done to expedite things at this point. Prosecutors filed their cases last year, but now, they’re in judges’ hands — and judges are not beholden to the election…
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