After what happened with the Fani Willis case on Friday, even CNN’s Jeffrey Toobin is convinced former President Donald Trump is on track to victory.
As previously reported, a judge ruled Friday that Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis may only remain on the case if she ousts special prosecutor Nathan Wade, with whom she’s been found to have had an affair.
Speaking about this development later Friday evening, Toobin told CNN host Anderson Cooper it’s a positive one for Trump because it evidently suggests the trial most likely won’t occur before the 2024 presidential election.
Listen:
“Today was a very good day for Donald Trump — this case is going nowhere,” he said. “Even if in the extremely unlikely event that this somehow staggers to trial in August or in the fall, think about this: There’s another racketeering case in Georgia where jury selection, not the trial, jury selection has taken a year. This case is never going to trial before the election.”
“It’s an embarrassment, all of this. I mean, Fani Willis has hung on, but this case is going nowhere very quickly,” he added.
Speaking next, former DeKalb County district attorney Gwen Keyes expressed disagreement.
“I disagree with Mr. Toobin,” she said. “I do think that there is enough evidence to go forward. I think that particularly the timing in this case, while we’ve had one racketeering case that has taken a long time to go to a jury, that’s an anomaly.”
“In my 17 years as a state prosecutor. I’ve never seen it take 10 or 12 months to get a jury. And in the last RICO case that I’m aware of D.A. Willis taking to trial – with 12 defendants – she was able to get a jury in about four weeks. So, I think that’s the precedent that we should be looking at,” she added.
Later during the segment, Toobin sought to refute Keyes’ rebuttal.
Listen:
“And as far as I can tell, this trial will be conducted during the presidency of Malia Obama,” he said. “I mean, it is so far behind. I mean, OK, jury selection will take somewhere between a month and a year. There are lots of legal motions that are still to be decided in this case, just as there are in the other cases that Trump is facing.”
The great irony is that in complaining about this and other Trump cases not being litigated before the 2024 election, Toobin and Keyes have both demonstrated the real purpose of these prosecutions: To prevent Trump from winning reelection.
Plus, and this is important, if Trump does win reelection, chances are every single case against him may become moot.
“Paul Golden, a partner at New York law firm Coffey Modica, [has said] that the Supreme Court has left a pathway open for a president to claim that court proceedings would interfere with his work,” Newsweek reported in November.
Newsweek also noted via Golden that “the Justice Department has concluded that criminal trials against a sitting president would be unconstitutional.”
Regarding the Supreme Court, in 1997 then-Justice Stephen Breyer “suggested presidents may be able to halt civil lawsuits if they claim that it interferes with their work.”
“That was in the landmark decision in a sexual harassment case taken by Arkansas state worker, Paula Jones, against the then president, Bill Clinton,” according to Newsweek.
“In a concurring opinion, Breyer noted that if the President could set forth and explain a conflict between a judicial proceeding and his or her ability to perform public duties, the President might be entitled to a postponement,” Golden noted in his own words.
Donald Trump can stop all his trials in one fell swoop https://t.co/sKupexduul pic.twitter.com/XECQCu4nYB
— Newsweek (@Newsweek) November 22, 2023
In his decision, Breyer reportedly said that the U.S. Constitution doesn’t automatically grant a president immunity from civil suits, but stressed that “once the President sets forth and explains a conflict between judicial proceedings and public duties, the matter changes.”
“At that point, the Constitution permits a judge to schedule a trial in an ordinary civil damages action…only within the constraints of a constitutional principle—a principle that forbids a federal judge in such a case to interfere with the President’s discharge of his public duties,” he added.
According to Golden, this could be applied to both civil and criminal cases.
“One of many strategies a sitting president could use, therefore, would be to file a motion in the context of the state case, arguing that allowing a criminal case to continue would affect the president’s ability to run the country. But there are a host of other potential strategies available as well,” he said.
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Author: Vivek Saxena
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