(Dobbs) Trump's Trial? It Would Be Wrong To Put It Off
It's a simple principle: Trump does not deserve deference.
The date for Donald Trump’s first federal trial for crimes against our country— for allegedly putting our national security at risk, then conspiring to obstruct an investigation to uncover it— is set. It is not set in stone, because his lawyers already have made it clear that they will try to force long delays. They have suggested that in pre-trial hearings, they will argue that the Presidential Records Act permitted Trump to remove the controversial documents from the White House, that some of documents marked as classified shouldn’t have been, and that the prosecutor doesn’t actually have the authority to put Trump on trial in the first place.
But while the Florida judge assigned to the trial, Aileen Cannon, acknowledged that because of their pleas, the trial could be pushed back, for now she decided that ten months is enough for Trump’s legal team to go through the prosecutor’s “voluminous" evidence of a million-plus pages of unclassified documents, more than 1,500 pages of classified documents, recordings from electronic devices, and at least nine months worth of surveillance footage from Mar-a-Lago and elsewhere in Florida. She set the date for the trial to start as early as May 20, 2024.
Needless to say, that puts it right up against next year’s presidential election. Most of the primaries will be behind us by then, but not all. So the question is, is the judge’s trial date fair? Is it fair to Trump? My answer is, yes, absolutely. Not that it won’t put a crimp in his campaign if his trial starts while he’s running for president— that is the reason his lawyers gave for postponing it until after the election. But here’s why that shouldn’t happen: every day people are inconvenienced in ways big and small because they have been charged with crimes and put on trial. Every day people have to walk away from their jobs to defend themselves in court. Right now Donald Trump’s job is running for president. To a degree, what the judge is saying is that Trump is no different than anyone else. He’ll just have to put the job aside to face justice.
Remember the two principles here: equal justice under the law, and no man is above the law.
I doubt that Trump’s lawyers could find grounds to argue that someone running for a seat in a state legislature, for example, or someone running for city council, should have a trial postponed because they’re busy running for office. Sure, in Trump’s case the stakes are a lot higher but the stakes for our system of justice are higher too. He is not a president any more, just a former president. Deferring to his desire to win public office again would put him above everyone else. His job should not take precedence over the job of the judicial system to try him for criminal acts which, if he’s proven guilty, would affirm that he knowingly committed up to 38 crimes, including violation of the Espionage Act.
Although Trump rants that these charges are the arbitrary action of his likely presidential rival Joe Biden— or of the prosecutor Jack Smith, who he characteristically calls “deranged” for doing his job— they’re not.
They are the conclusion of a grand jury, theoretically a jury of Trump’s peers, who decided that there is enough evidence to put him on trial. And it probably won’t be the last grand jury he hears from. Another one is meeting right now in Washington, considering charges in connection with January 6th. There’s yet another in Georgia, looking at evidence that Donald Trump illegally tried to change the outcome of the 2020 election there.
I do have some concern about Judge Cannon.
After all, she has Trump to thank for appointing her in 2020 to the federal bench. If she wants to she could tilt some decisions in his favor. That appeared to be the case last year when she issued a ruling that put some of the Justice Department’s investigation about the documents at Mar-a-Lago on hold while a special master would review them. A federal appeals court— with one judge appointed by President George W. Bush and the other two appointed by Trump— almost angrily overturned her decision.
But to be fair, if the lottery for assigning judges to trials had put this one in the lap of a judge appointed by a Democrat, there could have been a tilt in the other direction. Anyway, we don’t really know whether Cannon made that ruling last year favoring Trump because she is fanatically tied to him, or because she thought she was doing him a favor in return for her plum appointment. Either way, the eyes of America now are on her. That doesn’t always stop people bent on politicizing something, but the optimistic view is, it would give pause to some, particularly a federal judge those whose very job is to show even-handedness.
There is also concern about the jury pool. Judge Cannon will have the trial in her own federal courtroom in Fort Pierce, Florida, which means the jury pool will come from counties that Trump won in both 2016 and 2020. The optimistic view is, prosecutors will have enough options to reject potential jurors who seem to be overt supporters of the former president, just as the defense will be able to reject potential jurors who seem to like Joe Biden.
All of this is uncharted territory. Everyone will be wrestling with whether or not to show any deference to Donald Trump at all, either because he’s a candidate for president or because he’s a former president. No one can predict the outcome of those decisions, let alone the outcome of the trial. But for now, Donald Trump has a date in court. It’s a decent start.
Over more than five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 37-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.
Blind justice is rarely that. Should she recuse herself because of her close ties to the defendant? In a perfect world yes. Can we expect a non biased jury in a region heavily in support of trump at any cost? Probably not. If the evidence is strong enough and the eyes of the world are focused on the details, the trial may be forced to be at least somewhat fair and balanced.
Cannon will show deference no doubt. But i think that the problem of how/what top secret docs can be evidence given their security makes much about this trial difficult. Well said, thanks Greg.