The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) dashed the hopes of Americans hoping for a speedy trial for former President Donald Trump by accepting his immunity appeal. But one legal expert is still optimistic that Trump will get a verdict in Washington, D.C., before Election Day.
In a recent essay for Politico, Ankush Khardori — a former federal prosecutor who specialized in financial crimes — explained how the former president still stands a chance of having a public trial in the final weeks of the presidential campaign season. Khardori wrote that Department of Justice special counsel Jack Smith and U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan have signaled that the immense public interest in the case necessitates the completion of the trial before voters go to the polls.
“[A] federal statute requires judges to set trial dates that account for “the best interest of the public.” This is the exceedingly rare case in which we do not have to speculate on the matter. Americans have repeatedly told pollsters — nearly two-thirds of them, including roughly one-third of Republicans — that they want to see a verdict in the case before the election,” Khardori wrote. “It is not hard to understand why. American voters want information that can — and should — inform their votes for the highest office in the land, and they deserve to get it.”
Khardori explained that with oral arguments taking place on April 22, the Court might not issue a final ruling until its term ends in late June. That would still leave Chutkan — who has said she would allow up to three months for both sides to prepare for trial proceedings — with the opportunity to begin the trial by September. And even though Smith has said the trial would take four to eight weeks, Khardori opined that he may opt to only bring the strongest evidence to trial in an effort to speed up the process on his end.
“This would be an agonizing decision — prosecutors do not like running risks or holding back on evidence, and this case is as high-stakes as it gets — but that would be the smart thing to do at this point out of sheer necessity for their case,” he wrote.
He went on to suggest that Trump and his legal team would “almost certainly” argue that the trial shouldn’t be held so close to Election Day, and that doing so would be a form of “election interference” in preventing one of the two major party’s presidential nominees from hitting the campaign stump in battleground states. And he wrote that Judge Chutkan can expect threats against her from Trump supporters to “certainly increase” if she tries Trump before the election. But he concluded that Chutkan has to “hold the line,” and “put the case on the quickest and most reasonable trial schedule that she can devise.”
“The law, public opinion and common sense are all on her side,” he wrote.
