Trump Faces 3 Criminal Trials in 2024: Which Goes First Remains an Open Question

Alvin Bragg’s offer to give up his coveted trial slot for Donald Trump early in the jam-packed 2024 calendar just got a bit juicier thanks to Jack Smith’s latest indictment.

Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, is currently slated to put the former president on trial in March 2024 in New York Supreme Court over hush money payments tied to the 2016 White House campaign. 

But Bragg last weekend created an opening for the Justice Department special counsel if he wanted to make a move and try to seize those precious weeks next spring for his case about Trump's interference with the 2020 election results.  

Enter U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan. The Barack Obama appointee will have a big say over the entire schedule now that she’s overseeing Smith’s newest case charging Trump with four counts connected to his bid to overturn the results from the last presidential race, culminating in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. 

Trump is scheduled to be arraigned on Thursday afternoon before a U.S. magistrate judge at the federal courthouse near Capitol Hill. That’s a key preliminary step that will then set the stage for Chutkan to begin mapping out the calendar ahead, with the input of Smith, attorneys for the former president and importantly the other judges who have been assigned their own pieces of the fast-expanding Trump legal docket.

“I think Jack Smith is going to take him up on it,” Norm Eisen, a longtime Democratic attorney, told CNN on Tuesday in reference to Bragg’s offer of giving up his March 25, 2024, trial date. 

“I think Judge Tanya Chutkan, an accomplished trial lawyer, knows how to move cases fast,” added Eisen, a former counsel for House Democrats during Trump’s first impeachment. “She's dealt with these identical issues with Donald Trump's fights with the January 6 committee over documents. They're gonna say, ‘Fine. Let's go.’ There is no reason a simple streamlined case cannot go in that March 24 timeframe. That’s what Smith wants.”

Not everyone agrees with Eisen’s assessment. 

Trump’s lawyers already lost once in their push to get Smith’s first sweeping federal criminal indictment tied to the ex-president’s handling of classified documents scheduled after the 2024 election. 

While U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon penciled that case in for next May in her South Florida federal courtroom, the former president’s attorneys are saying they will press Chutkan to punt on any trial start date until the next Election Day is in the history books. Legal experts note that Trump’s Constitutional right to due process will be on their side as they make a case for getting more time.

“He had three and a half years. Why don’t we make it equal?” John Lauro, a Trump attorney, said on NBC’s “Today.” 

“The bottom line is that they have 60 federal agents working on this, 60 lawyers, all kinds of government personnel, and we get this indictment and they want to go to trial and 90 days. Does that sound like justice to you?”

The timing of multiple Trump trials may sound like a pure logistics issue. But it’s so much more considering Trump is also the front-runner for the Republican 2024 presidential nomination. 

Next year is shaping up to be a mishmash for the 77-year old Trump of campaigning for the White House and defending himself against a potential life sentence of a prison term. He’s hoping that any federal jury verdicts can wait until he’s at least had a chance to convince American voters that he deserves a second term as president. Such an outcome, if it went the Republican's way in 2024, likely would lead to a controversial and untested move for a presidential self pardon or an outright presidential order to the Justice Department that it shut down the criminal cases against him. 

“Something has to give,” Elie Honig, a former federal prosecutor, said on CNN on Wednesday. He gamed out on the cable network that under the current calendar arrangement Trump will be on trial in New York through April and then will quickly need to pivot to his classified documents trial that’s projected to run from late May through July.

“You’re not going to start a January 6 trial in August of 2024. That’s going to carry through the election," said Honig. "So the only other possibility is before. You’d have to start that basically tomorrow in order to get that in. So only if one of these two trials that’s set right now moves.” 

Speaking on Tuesday as he unveiled his latest criminal charges against Trump, Smith did say he plans to push for a speedy trial. What he didn't say was how fast he could make that happen.

Part of Smith's calculation likely has to do with the timing of the May trial date in the Florida case. The special counsel's team had initially tried to get moving under Cannon this December, but she instead opted to wait for five additional months.

William Jeffress, a longtime DC-based defense attorney who represented Richard Nixon in his post-presidency, said Trump's May trial date in Florida could still get pushed back because of the challenging and time-consuming procedures required under the Classified Information Procedures Act. Known as CIPA, the law establishes rules for introducing redacted sensitive information in trial.

"Jack Smith’s view on which case should go first will be important, but it is my guess that if Judge Chutkan is willing and Judge Cannon agrees, the DC trial will be set for May and will last well into July," said Jeffress.

For comparison, Jeffress noted another case where CIPA kicked in that he participated in as the lead lawyer for Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the George W. Bush senior White House aide convicted on four counts over his role in the leak investigation into the covert identity of Iraq War critic Valerie Plame Wilson. Libby's case took more than 14 months between his October 2005 indictment and his February-March 2007 trial.

Ty Cobb, a former Trump White House attorney, told The Messenger he thinks the soonest Smith's 2020 election interference case could be ready for trial is in July or August. That much time is needed because of the volume of materials that Smith's team will need to share with the president's lawyers, as well as for the dozens of witnesses who could be brought in to testify for the prosecution in Washington.

There's also another wild card: Whether Smith moves before the Trump trial to charge any of the six unnamed co-conspirators mentioned in Tuesday's indictment. That too would slow things down, Cobb said.

“It’s not a difficult case to prove, but there’s a lot of discovery," Cobb said. “This is the most important criminal case in the history of America. It should be done right."