Delay, delay, delay: Three motions from Trump’s legal team make his only strategy clear

Donald Trump’s latest team of lawyers certainly had a busy week. Last Monday, opening statements began in the civil bench trial of the State of New York vs. Donald Trump, et al over inflated assets in fraudulent statements. The judge in that case, - Arthur Engoron, - had days before ruled for partial summary judgment against Trump and his co-defendants and held all liable for “persistent and repeated” fraudulent behavior. Meanwhile, as the former president was busy attacking the judicial system, continuing to obstruct justice, and calling out prosecutors and judges in violation of his recently imposed gag order, and his lawyers were getting pummeled in his civil fraud case that will in all likelihood put the Trump Organization out of business.

So team Trump has filed three significant motions to dismiss and/or delay his legal cases from moving forward. And as special counsel Jack Smith said in a statement blasting the strategy this Monday, Trump’s lawyers “provide no credible justification to postpone.” 

In the USA vs. Donald J. Trump case in Washington, DC, the former president has been charged with conspiracies to defraud the United States, interfere with official electoral proceedings, and deny people their civil rights to vote and to have their votes counted. His lawyers, citing Nixon v. Fitzgerald, filed a 52-page motion to dismiss the indictment based on absolute immunity “for acts within the ‘outer perimeter of [the President’s] official responsibility.”In their introduction they argue that the incumbent administration, breaking with 234 years of precedent, “has charged Trump for acts that lie not just within the ‘outer perimeter,’ but at the heart of his official responsibilities as President. In doing so, the prosecution does not, and cannot, argue that President Trump’s efforts to ensure election integrity, and to advocate for the same, were outside the scope of his official duties.” 

In trying to characterize the conduct of the charges against Trump as simply carrying out the normal business of the president, they are of course ignoring the fact that Trump had successfully and unsuccessfully enlisted other people to conspire in illegal acts to overturn the 2020 election. As Joyce Vance has written, “No matter how Trump’s lawyers try to dress it up and normalize it, it’s criminal conduct. Sure, Trump can have conversations with people, but when they’re about trying to change the results of an election he’s lost, they cross the line and are no longer within the official governing duties of a president, not even within the outer edges of its periphery.”

Trump’s team also makes, without legal citations, less serious arguments such as impeachment is the only remedy that can be taken against a sitting president. And contorting the text of the Constitution even further, his attorneys contend that without the House of Representatives’  articles of impeachment resulting in the conviction of a president in the Senate, that the former president cannot be prosecuted.    

While this motion to dismiss should inevitably fail even assuming that it is appealed up to the U.S. Supreme Court, it could very well postpone the January 6 trial to well after its starting date scheduled to begin on March 4, 2024. 

In USA vs. Donald J. Trump, et al in the stolen classified documents Mar-a-Lago case in Florida, his attorneys filed a 12-page motion last Wednesday to postpone the trial for a second time until after the 2024 presidential election. There are essentially two arguments in this motion to delay the trial that has been set for May 2024.First, that postponement was necessary because of scheduling conflicts. These included that the January 6 trial was scheduled to begin in March 2024 and that one of Trump’s attorneys in the Mar-a-Lago case, Chris Kise, was also the lead attorney representing the former president in the ongoing civil fraud trial in New York that should last until late December.Second, and somewhat more legalistically reasonable is the charge that special counsel Jack Smith had not been candid when he had stated that everything necessary about the classified documents for trial to begin had been turned over to the defense and that the prosecution was ready to proceed. 

Some material may not in fact have been turned over to the defense for good reason. Whether that was justifiable or not, it still should not have required an additional nine months to prepare for the case. It is highly probable that whatever information Smith may not have shared with Trump and  his two co-defendants, aide Walt Nauta and Mar-a-Lago property manager Carlos De Oliveira, had to do with its top-secret nature and the communications regarding those particular classified documents.   Such as the breaking news by ABC on Thursday evening, for example, that Trump had shared at Mar-a-Lago sensitive information about American submarines with an Australian billionaire soon after leaving office and that the businessman Anthony Pratt went on to share details with several others about the U.S. nuclear fleet, including the submarines’ “tactical capacities” and the number of “nuclear warheads the vessels carried and how close they could get to their Russian counterparts without being detected.” 

For his part, Smith blasted Trump’s motion as baseless because, he argued, “The vast majority of classified discovery is also available to the defendants.”

“The Government has provided the defendants extensive, prompt, and well-organized unclassified discovery, yielding an exhaustive roadmap of proof of the detailed allegations in the superseding indictment,” Smith wrote in a filing on Monday to U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon..

In the first effort to delay the case until after the 2024 election because of delays involved in creating a secure facility for Trump to view the documents, Judge Aileen Cannon on Friday “granted a temporary stay while she decides whether to push back the pre-trial schedule” as well.  

In The People of the State of New York vs Donald J. Trump case, with its 34 felony counts also set to begin in March 2024, Trump’s attorneys moved to dismiss the “meandering” New York hush money case because according to the court filing the “Manhattan district attorney took too long” before he decided to prosecute the former president on “the years-old allegations.”  

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For some context about the Plaintiff in Chief with respect to the former president’s modus operandi of countersuing, intimidating and harassing his adversaries which has occurred more than 2000 times, he often does not follow through with the lawsuit. 

Accordingly, after moving the date for his deposition in the civil lawsuit, Donald Trump vs. Michael Cohen, which had been scheduled for last week as well and presented a conflict of sorts, but not really, with his civil fraud trial getting underway, Trump “temporarily” dropped his $500 million “lawsuit against his former lawyer-turned-witness,” Michael Cohen, who he has accused of “malicious intent” for “spreading falsehoods” and causing “vast reputational harm.” Trump was suing Cohen for breaching their attorney-client relationship because his former “fixer” had testified before Congress back in 2017, has written two best-selling books about their history together, and more recently has been talking publicly not only about the illegal hush-money payments to women during the 2016 presidential race but also about Trump’s fraudulent ways of conducting everyday business. 

In response to Trump’s dropping the lawsuit on Thursday – which I am willing to bet will be permanently discontinued –Cohen had this to say: “This case was nothing more than a retaliatory intimidation tactic, and his attempt to hide from routine discovery procedures confirms as much.”

So many lawsuits and so little time for the fraudster in chief. Then again, what else is the not persecuted and weaponizing Trump to do, especially when he is an insurrectionist and wannabe dictator trying to regain the White House in hopes of staying out of jail?