FOR THE WEEK OF NOV. 11, 2024

Trump gains breaks in legal cases with his second presidential election win

For Donald Trump, winning another term last week brings a get-out-of-court break. He didn't just beat Vice President Kamala Harris -- he beat the chance of going to jail. His victory guarantees that he'll never face serious legal accountability for alleged wrongdoing. This is something new for our country, fresh history-in-the-making. Never before has a criminal defendant been elected to the highest U.S. office, just as an ex-president had never been criminally charged until last year.

Jack Smith, a federal special counsel appointed in November 2022 by Attorney General Merrick Garland, won two separate grand jury indictments of Trump last year. The ex-president, first elected in 2016, was accused in June 2023 of 40 counts of keeping classified documents after leaving office and then obstructing efforts to retrieve them. Two months later, he was charged with four counts of trying to overthrow the government when he lost in 2020. Smith reportedly is preparing to end both cases because of a Justice Department policy against prosecuting a sitting president. (In any event, Trump's new attorney general can drop the charges after the Jan. 20 inauguration.)

Two state cases against Trump also are unlikely to continue. He faces sentencing Nov. 26 on hush money charges in New York, where Manhattan jurors last May convicted him of 34 felonies for falsifying records to hide a $130,000 payment to cover up a sex scandal. Defense lawyers will try to postpone it for four years and asked earlier that the guilty verdict be set aside in light of a Supreme Court ruling in July on presidential immunity. "Any reasonable judge wouldn't sentence the president-elect," says Jill Konviser, a retired New York judge. And prosecutors in Georgia won't put a sitting president on trial for alleged 2020 election interference, as he was charged with by grand jurors in August 2023. "It clearly paid off to aggressively push to delay these cases as long as possible," says Jessica Levinson, a constitutional law professor at Loyola University in Chicago.

Trump spokesman says: "Americans want an immediate end to the weaponization of our justice system, so we can, as President Trump said in his historic speech Tuesday night, unify our country and work together for the betterment of our nation." – Steven Cheung, campaign communications director

Legal affairs blogger says: "It bothers me deeply that Trump has avoided accountability at the hands of a [federal] jury that would consider the evidence against him." – Joyce Vance, past federal prosecutor, on Substack

Law professor says: "The public does not like politically motivated prosecutions. The [campaign] argument that Trump was a convicted felon backfired, as the public saw him as a victim of biased and politically motivated prosecutions brought in Democratic strongholds." -- Gregory Germain, Syracuse University

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