Trump's Trials - Trump wins in court and at the ballot box

Episode Date: March 9, 2024

This week on Trump's Trials, host Scott Detrow and Domenico Montanaro are joined by Justice Correspondent Carrie Johnson.Carrie shares new reporting she has on the possible timeline for the federal election interference case. We also discuss Super Tuesday results and if exit polling gives us an indication on how Republican voters are thinking about former President Donald Trump's legal troubles. Topics include: - Timeline for federal election interference case - Supreme Court's Colorado ballot decision - Super Tuesday- Update on classified documents case Follow the show on Apple Podcasts or Spotify for new episodes each Saturday.Sign up for sponsor-free episodes and support NPR's political journalism at plus.npr.org/trumpstrials.Email the show at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Donald Trump is posting wins in court and at the ballot box. From NPR, it's Trump's Trials. I'm Scott Detrow. We will vote! We will vote! This is a persecution. He actually just stormed out of the courtroom. Innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. On Monday, the former president began the week with a win at the Supreme Court, where the justices unanimously ruled to keep him on the ballot.

A day later, he swept nearly all the Republican primaries on Super Tuesday. By Wednesday morning, he was the last Republican standing in the presidential field. Now the party's presumptive presidential nominee, Trump, is reaping the benefits of a legal strategy of delay. Remember, Monday was originally meant to be the first day of the federal election interference case, but that case is delayed indefinitely and there is a real chance the trial might not happen or wrap up before the November election. We'll get into all of that and more with our regular guest, Domenico Montanaro, NPR's senior political editor and correspondent. Domenico, how's it going? I'm good, Scott. I think I'm awake. Yeah. A lot of late nights and news this week. It's been a bit this week. Yeah. So Trump's the presumptive nominee now. We're now in general

election mode. Joe Biden's State of the Union really made that clear. What can we expect from Trump when it comes to his presidential campaign and his legal strategy? Well, I mean, Trump's clearly feeling pretty good right now. I mean, he easily won 14 of the 15 states on Super Tuesday. He's got a huge lead now, essentially locked up the nomination. We can call him the presumptive nominee because Nikki Haley, his top opponent, has dropped out. He's holding up well in general election polls. The Supreme Court gave him a key victory this week, keeping him on the ballot in Colorado in that

14th Amendment case. But you've heard me say before, a conviction in any of these cases theoretically would hurt him with voters. When we looked at the exit polls in Virginia, North Carolina, and California this past week on Super Tuesday, roughly about a third of voters said that if Trump was convicted, he would not be fit to be president. That's of Republicans and independents who lean Republicans. He knows this. His lawyers know this. And they've had pretty good success in shaping the legal calendar to avoid that outcome, as you said, in trying to delay. So, yes, one of the criminal cases is going to trial this month in New York.

But it doesn't revolve around Trump's conduct as president, his failed attempt to overturn the 2020 election, which is really more the fundamental case that a lot of people are thinking about and want to see a decision in. You know, our polling has shown, you know, a small decline, really a leveling off of Americans who believe that Trump has done something illegal since the January 6th committee hearings before Congress. All right. So stick around. We will be joined by NPR justice correspondent Kerry Johnson. We'll talk about all of that. We'll also hear about some new reporting that Kerry has on the possible timeline of this big federal January 6th case. Stick around.

This message comes from NPR sponsor SAP Concur. Stuart McLean, CFO of Brother UK, shares how SAP Concur's audit and expense tool supports their work across multiple offices. Across Europe, we have a presence in 17 countries, which obviously involve 17 different tax regulations, 17 different fiscal authorities. And this makes life complicated for us. But actually, with SAP Concur, we're able to configure the system correctly for each of those countries. We're able to configure the audit rules correctly for each of those countries. So actually, it gives us a lot of efficiency and good governance as well. So actually, for us, a solution like SAP Concur makes life so much easier. Otherwise, we'd be forever checking back to regulations, checking back to documentation. Those are automatically updated in the system for us. So that's, you know, it's a big tick in the

box from a governance perspective and an efficiency perspective as well. Visit Concur.com to learn more. We are back and we are joined by NPR justice correspondent, Carrie Johnson. Hey, Carrie. Hey, Scott. So let's remind everybody that this week we were all supposed to be, according to the initial timeline, covering the first week of the January 6th federal trial. Of course, that is delayed. It is in front of the

Supreme Court now on this key question of presidential immunity. The court said this week that they will hear oral arguments on that question on April 25th. We all have been thinking and talking and trying to figure out the timeline here. What can you tell us about what the timeline from April 25th on could look like? So, Scott, it depends on when the Supreme Court issues a ruling in this case and what it says, right? So if the court issues a ruling in late June or early July, that still presumably would give the trial judge, Tanya Chutkin, enough time to proceed and at least start the trial before the election. But there are a couple of complicating factors here. One is that we don't

know whether the justices or a majority of the justices are going to send this case back for more work to the district court. The question they're asking is about presidential immunity in official acts. And it could be, and we don't know because it hasn't been argued yet, it could be that these justices want the trial judge to go back and figure out which of Trump's behaviors on and around January 6th and thereafter were official acts and which were the acts of a candidate running for office. And so that could require a lot more work of the trial judge. And presumably, Trump could appeal those determinations. And that, I'm told,

could be the death knell for a trial in that case this year. Other thing I want to ask you while we had you here was that a lot has been made of the 80 something days between when the proceedings were frozen and this immunity question began, and when the trial was supposed to start. And there's a lot of thinking out there that, well, whenever you get the Supreme Court ruling, that would start an 80-something day clock. Is that how you understand it? I have some new reporting on this. Okay. So Judge Chutkin did say at a status conference in the Trump case that she would think about giving him 82 or 88 days. But my new reporting suggests that people are making too much of that statement. Really? And that, in fact, she wants to give him a reasonable amount of time to prepare.

And maybe that would be four, five, six weeks. So it wouldn't be three months. It would be four, five, six weeks. And given four, five, six weeks, it's still possible. It's still possible, although the window is narrow for this trial to happen this year. although the window is narrow for this trial to happen this year. Dominica, that would make a big difference in the electoral calendar since that 80-something days we were talking about late September, early October, which is, of course, the final weeks of a presidential election.

Yeah, either way, we're really coming down to the wire a little bit on this. And, you know, the fact is Trump is already the presumptive nominee. I mean, we were talking about March 4th as a potential start to this federal trial. March 5th was Super Tuesday. Trump basically swept Super Tuesday, winning 14 of the 15 states. Don't sleep on Vermont, Domenico. Right. We're going back to Vermont. The maple syrup moment. It didn't stick. Oh, and the hay made it. That Arthur Fonzarelli hay. No one will understand what that was. I do.

I used to watch Nick at night. I had a wonderful interview with him earlier than last year. Onward, onward. Yeah, I mean, the fact is this timeline has slipped considerably, and it is clearly, if people didn't realize by now, it is going to be Trump versus Biden, barring something extraordinary from happening. It's those two guys in a rematch. And there are various levels of stages of grief that I think many people in the country are going through, denial, bargaining, and then eventually come around to acceptance that it is these two, and that that's when we're really going to understand where the country is. And the country is basically very, very divided and split on this. And it's likely to be a close

election decided within eight states. And anything at the margins could make a difference, including a conviction in one of these trials. Yeah. Kerry, a lifetime ago, also known as Monday. A lifetime ago, also known as Monday, this same Supreme Court gave Trump a big win, a unanimous win in the case looking at whether or not states had the power to kick Trump off the ballot for engaging in insurrection. Did anything in that ruling surprise you? They say it's a unanimous victory for Trump, and it was. But if you dig a little bit underneath the surface, five of the more conservative justices went farther than the liberals wanted to go. And that's important because what the court determined was that a state, an individual state, cannot go around disqualifying a federal candidate. a federal candidate. And there are lots of good reasons for that, such as like setting up a patchwork system and mass chaos and disenfranchising voters and confusing voters. But the majority went even farther and seemed to suggest that Congress would need to pass a special kind of law. And it would be hard to do this to remove somebody like Donald Trump from the ballot. And it would be hard

to do this in any moment, but especially before November. I do think it's funny, though, in part of that case, having Justice Amy Coney Barrett talk about how the court needs to turn the temperature down, considering everything that's happened controversially with former President Trump. And this idea that turning the temperature down is just about being civil to each other as opposed to like the actual rulings that they make that are pretty highly controversial and inflammatory, like, I don't know, the Dobbs decision. which some people are still very upset about and began or continued kind of a lack of confidence among some liberals in the Supreme Court. And two, Justice Barrett's concurrence seemed to be directed at the liberal justices, her fellow women on the bench, and the idea of calling them strident, as she did, and the idea of telling them that maybe they should dial it down a notch was an interesting kind of moment. But it did also distinguish Barrett, who's a Trump appointee, of course, from the other conservatives and the other men.

I'd at least watch the historical fiction of what could have gone on behind the scenes in a lot of this. It'd be pretty good. I mean, since we spent so much time talking about the 14th Amendment and the insurrection clause, did this ruling effectively water that down or kill it? I mean, like this is a group of justices who always talk about taking the Constitution at face value. There's language in the Constitution about this. They chose another path. It's very hard to imagine a successful legal challenge along these lines. Certainly, all of the state challenges to Donald Trump this year are over, dead on arrival. You know,

so Maine and Illinois and Colorado, which all tried to disqualify him, that's all done. And the rest of these pieces of litigation are going to go away if they haven't already. Moving forward, it's going to be really, really hard for Congress, I think, to pass the kind of law the Supreme Court laid out here that would allow someone to be disqualified, a candidate for federal office, certainly a president of the United States. And I think that's exactly what Chief Justice John Roberts was trying to do. And Roberts likes to point back to Congress or punt as much as he possibly can on a lot of these controversial cases. He did that with this case, with this 14th Amendment case,

pointing to Section 5, saying that it's up to Congress to enforce the insurrection clause, essentially, when the rest of the 14th Amendment isn't enforced necessarily by an act of Congress. As Carrie and I've talked about, the liberal justices noted this in their other concurrence that read more like a dissent. And I do wonder what it's going to mean for the future of 14th Amendment cases, but also for the Trump cases, for this immunity case, are they going to try to look for some other off ramp that excuses them from having to say whether or not a president is truly above the law or not? I don't think there's any getting around that. Okay. So we, there's no duck in that

question, friend. I mean, we could talk about it again in April, but I think not. Okay. And, and we do have some precedent, right? We have, this Supreme Court has heard multiple cases involving Donald Trump and his financial records, his accounting records, the records the White House didn't want to turn over related to January 6th. This Supreme Court has sided with those legal challengers and not Donald Trump on all those issues. And, of course, the Supreme Court in 1974 very rapidly, within two months, Scott, two months it took for them to decide the question of Richard Nixon and the White House tapes that he did not want to turn over. So the Supreme Court can move very quickly when it comes to allegations of illegality against a president. And we'll see how quickly they move in April. Domenico, let's talk about the election and the politics of this.

You mentioned Super Tuesday, Trump's near sweep, Nikki Haley drops out of the race. Primary days are also days for us to gather new information about what voters are thinking. Did anything jump out to you in the exit polls or the results that kind of indicate how voters' thoughts on all of these criminal cases have shifted? Well, there were exit polls only in three states this time around, which is less than usually get done on Super Tuesdays. But I think everyone saw the writing on the wall. But you had exit polls in California, North Carolina and Virginia, and all of them had very similar results. would still be fit for office even if he was convicted, 60 plus percent in many cases. Now, what's interesting about that is that means that there are some 30 plus percent who think that he wouldn't be fit for office. Now, does that mean that all of them wouldn't vote for Trump?

I kind of doubt it, right? But if there's any small percentage that Trump would wind up losing because people think that he was convicted of something and that that's not appropriate. I don't know how that plays out in a general election. I think there are a lot of people, though, who think that people should at least have all the information and make the choice based on whether or not Trump, a jury of his peers, convicts him or quits him. Kerry, let's shift gears to Florida now. A week ago, there was a long hearing. his peers, convicts him or quits him. Kerry, let's shift gears to Florida now.

A week ago, there was a long hearing. We thought that Judge Cannon might set an actual trial date. She has not yet issued that ruling. We are waiting for that key decision from Judge Cannon. Any other developments to keep our eyes on in the classified documents case? Yeah, a couple of things. Judge Cannon has now set another hearing for next week on all kinds of motions back and forth between Trump and the special counsel team. And the other thing that I noticed this week was that two lawyers who

typically handle appeals for the special counsel who've been involved in the Trump immunity case in D.C. and the gag order case involving Donald Trump in D.C., these appellate lawyers have signed on to the Florida case, which could be a signal that the Justice Department is considering appealing something Judge Cannon has done or will do in the near future. Because otherwise, there's no need for these appellate fellows to log into the case the way they've done. Does that just slow everything down? Seems like it would kind of elongate the timeline. I don't know how it's possible to make that case run even more slowly than it already is, to be honest with you.

And reminder that the conversation at last week's hearing was about some sort of late summer start debate. But I think even that timeline seems dubious to a lot of people watching this. Yeah. Jack Smith had asked for a trial date in July. Trump had asked for a trial date in 2025 or later, but basically settled on August, maybe. And that seems super optimistic to me, given all the fighting that's been going back and forth. The other thing that happened this week in this case is that, you know, Trump has been leaning on the Robert Hearst special counsel report about Joe Biden and his storage of classified documents at his house and his office. Storage of classified materials in his home and discussions about them with his biographer are not at all the same thing as Donald Trump did in Florida at his resort. And they also compared and contrasted Trump's behavior to a plethora of other people like Hillary Clinton, James Comey, and, you know, basically the lineup of individuals who've been under investigation for classified materials in their houses and offices for the last 20 years or

so. Right. As damaging as that her report was for Biden, let's remember this all started when a Biden staffer found some classified documents, ran it up the ladder, and Biden's world contacted the DOJ as opposed to the FBI raiding Mar-a-Lago to get some documents back. Yeah. As opposed to, let's make it even more of a finer point, as opposed to the Justice Department asking repeatedly, very nicely for the documents, subpoenaing for the documents, still not getting all the documents, and the FBI having to execute a lawful search warrant at Mar-a-Lago. You phrased it better than me.

Well, raids seems to connote men coming in the middle of the night with all kinds of armor on and battering down the door. And that's not what happened in Mar-a-Lago. Remember, they were careful even to dress in like khaki pants and polo shirts and not advertise their presence at the time. Well, it's Palm Beach, so. I guess. Is there anything that happened this past week that materially changed the campaign or these criminal cases? and immunity and whether they are going to be willing to get into the sometimes gruesome details of the conduct on January 6th before, during, and after. Because they certainly shied away from that, Scott. They ran away from that as far as they could in this Colorado disqualification case. And I think they need to confront some of that in April. And if they don't, that's going to be a strong signal of what they might do.

I mean, Super Tuesday happened. And I think that that obviously has, we all kind of could see what was happening. But Trump went into Super Tuesday with a 200 something delegate lead. He's come out of it with far more than that and could clinch on Tuesday. The numbers are there, and he probably will. Domenico Montanaro, Kerry Johnson, thanks as always. You got it, Scott. Thank you. We'll be back next week with another episode of Trump's Trials.

Thanks to our supporters who hear the show sponsor-free. If that is not you, still could be. You can sign up at plus.npr.org or subscribe on our show page and Apple Podcasts. This show is produced by Tyler Bartlom and edited by Adam Rainey, Krishnadev Kalamar, and Steve Drummond. Our executive producers are Beth Donovan and Sam Yenigan. Eric Maripoti is NPR's vice president of news programming. I'm Scott Detrow. Thanks for listening to Trump's Trials from NPR. Support for NPR and the following message come from SAP Concur, a leading brand for integrated travel expense and invoice management solutions.

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