If his posture as a victim of “persecution of a political opponent” makes his detractors smile, Donald Trump finds himself, after his last indictment, at the mercy of an uncertain judicial calendar which burdens his campaign to reconquer the White House in 2024.
The 77-year-old former Republican president, now prosecuted at the federal level in Washington and Florida (southeast) and by the justice of the State of New York, risks also being sued soon by that of Georgia (south ).
“We’ve never seen a favorite of a major political party try to campaign under multiple indictments, so we don’t really know how that’s going to turn out,” law professor Steven Schwinn told AFP. at the University of Illinois.
On August 28, Federal Judge Tanya Chutkan will preside over a hearing in Washington to set a trial date for her attempts to subvert the electoral process in 2020, after receiving submissions from the prosecution and defense.
Faced with the heavy file put together by the special prosecutor Jack Smith, who wants a quick trial, Donald Trump has little other parade than to play for time, according to experts.
While some commentators have spoken of a river trial that could last up to nine months, a former adviser to the Trump administration who has become one of his opponents, Ty Cobb, has called this hypothesis “aberrant”. “The Crown has a very, very strong case. It will probably take them four to six weeks to present it,” he told CNN on Thursday.
“This case could come to trial at the very beginning of the year and I would not be surprised if it was the first on the court agenda,” he added.
“Trump has no legal argument to delay criminal proceedings in order to spare his campaign program”, but the existing avenues of appeal could allow him to do so, says Steven Schwinn.
Another procedure at the level of the State of Georgia relating to facts already covered by the prosecution in federal court in Washington could also lead to a trial.
The investigation was sparked by a January 2021 phone call from Donald Trump asking a senior local official to “find” nearly 12,000 ballots in his name in order to be assigned Georgia’s 16 Electors instead. of his opponent Joe Biden.
The trial of the former president in another file investigated by the prosecutor Jack Smith, for his casualness in the treatment of classified documents, has already been fixed for May 2024, six months from the presidential election, in Florida.
He will have to explain himself beforehand in March before the justice of the State of New York on accounting fraud linked to the purchase of the silence of an actress of X films before the presidential election of 2016. The Manhattan prosecutor, Alvin Bragg, however, said he was willing to change the date to allow the federal trials to take place.
True to his line of defense, Donald Trump cries out for the instrumentalization of justice by the Biden administration.
“Biden and (his Attorney General Merrick) Garland are launching bogus procedures against me to make it difficult for me to campaign,” he wrote on his Truth Social platform Friday.
These lawsuits “take up a massive amount of my time and money. Resources that would have gone to ads and rallies must now be spent fighting these radical left thugs in many courts across the country,” he said. he lamented, calling on the Supreme Court to intervene.
However, five months before the start of the Republican primaries in January 2024, the billionaire leaves only crumbs to his rivals in the polls, distancing the best placed, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, by 37 points.
But this series of trials could force Donald Trump to divide his time between the dock and the stands at rallies, unless he manages to appease the judges.
The presence of the accused is the rule in criminal matters in federal courts and for most states, recalls Carl Tobias, professor of law at the University of Richmond. But the various judges in these trials could “try to spare his schedule if he presents reasonable requests to be absent”.
As to whether a conviction would prohibit Donald Trump from running for the highest office, the answer is simple: nothing in the Constitution provides for it.
04/08/2023 21:22:14 – Washington (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
