Federal Criminal Case Against Trump (Documents Case)

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      Trump Signals Plans to Go After Intelligence Community in Document Case

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      Court papers filed by his lawyers, formally a request for discovery evidence, sounded at times more like political talking points.Lawyers for former President Donald J. Trump said in court papers filed on Tuesday night that they intended to place accusations that the intelligence community was biased against Mr. Trump at the heart of their defense against charges accusing him of illegally holding onto dozens of highly sensitive classified documents after he left office.The lawyers also indicated that they were planning to defend Mr. Trump by seeking to prove that the investigation of the case was “politically motivated and biased.”The court papers, filed in Federal District Court in Fort Pierce, Fla., gave the clearest picture yet of the scorched earth legal strategy that Mr. Trump is apparently planning to use in fighting the classified documents indictment handed up over the summer.While the 68-page filing was formally a request by Mr. Trump’s lawyers to the office of the special counsel, Jack Smith, to provide them with reams of additional information that they believe can help them fight the charges, it often read more like a list of political talking points than a brief of legal arguments.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      The DeSantis Campaign Is Revealing What Republican Voters Really Want

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      If Ron DeSantis surprises in Iowa and beyond, if he recovers from his long polling swoon and wins the Republican nomination, it will represent the triumph of a simple, intuitive, but possibly mistaken idea: That voters should be taken at their word about what they actually want from their leaders.It was always clear, going into 2024, that a large minority of the Republican primary electorate would vote for Donald Trump no matter what — including, in the event of his untimely passing, for the former president’s reanimated corpse or his A.I. simulation. A smaller bloc strongly preferred a pre-Trump and un-Trump-like Republican; this has become the Nikki Haley constituency.This left a crucial middle bloc, maybe 40 percent of the party in my own guesstimation, that was Trump-friendly but also seemingly persuadable and open to another choice. These were those Republicans who mostly hadn’t voted for Trump in the early primaries in 2016, who had regarded him as the lesser of two evils during his tilt with Hillary Clinton, but who had gradually become more authentically favorable toward him over the course of his presidency — because of the judges he appointed, because of the strength of the economy, because they reacted against the hysteria of his liberal opponents, or just because of the alchemy of partisan identification.I talked to a lot of these kind of Republicans between 2016 and 2020 — not a perfectly representative sample, probably weighted too heavily toward Uber drivers and Catholic lawyer dads, but still enough to recognize a set of familiar refrains. These voters liked Trump’s policies more than his personality. They didn’t like some of his tweets and insults, so they mostly just tuned them out. They thought that he had the measure of liberals in a way that prior Republicans had not, that his take-no-prisoners style was suited to the scale of liberal media bias and progressive cultural hegemony. But they acknowledged that he didn’t always seem entirely in charge of his own administration, fully competent in the day-to-day running of the government.So their official position was that they wanted a version of Trump with less drama, who wasn’t constantly undermined by his generals or his bureaucrats, who didn’t seem confused about the difference between tweeting about a problem and actually addressing it. They didn’t want to go back to the pre-Trump G.O.P., but they also didn’t just want to replay Trump’s first term — especially how it ended, with Trump at war with his own public health apparatus over Covid while a left-wing cultural revolution surged through American cities and schools and mass media.Ron DeSantis’s entire persona as governor of Florida seemed to meet this ostensible demand. He had a strong record of both political and legislative success, having moved Florida rightward at the ballot box and in public policy — a clear contrast with Trump, as a one-term president who presided over notable Republican political defeats. DeSantis was a cultural battler who seemed more adept than Trump at picking fights and more willing than many pre-Trump Republicans to risk the wrath of big donors and corporations. His Covid record was exactly in tune with the party’s mood; he exuded competence when a hurricane hit; he fought constantly with the media and still won over Florida’s swing voters. If Republicans wanted to keep key elements of Trumpism but joined to greater competence, if they wanted a president who would promise to build a wall and then actually complete it, DeSantis was clearly the best and only possibility.Those voters still have a chance, beginning in Iowa, to make the choice they claimed to want. But if current polls are correct and they mostly just return to Trump, what will it say about how political identification really works?One argument will be that DeSantis failed the voters who were open to supporting him, by failing to embody on the campaign trail the brand that he built up in Florida and that had built him solid national polling numbers before he jumped into the race.For instance, it’s clear that the ability to wrangle happily with the liberal media is a crucial part of the Trumpian persona, and having showed some of that ability in Florida, DeSantis unaccountably tried to run a presidential campaign exclusively via right-wing outlets and very-online formats like his disastrous Muskian debut. His lack of charisma relative to Trump was always going to be a problem, but he still made it worse by cocooning himself, initially at least, from the conflicts that should have been a selling point.Or again, any Trumpism-without-Trump would presumably need to copy some of Trump’s flair for ideological heterodoxy, his willingness to ignore the enforcers of True Conservatism and promise big — new infrastructure projects, universal health care, flying cars — whatever the indifferent follow-through. And again, while the DeSantis of Florida seemed to have some instinct for this approach — attacking woke ideology in schools while also raising teacher salaries, say — as a presidential candidate he’s been more conventional, running the kind of ideologically narrow campaign that already failed to deliver Ted Cruz the nomination in 2016.But allowing for these kind of specific critiques of how DeSantis has failed to occupy the space he seemed to have carved out, his struggles still seem more about the gap between what voters might seem to want on paper and how political attractions are actually forged.Here DeSantis might be compared to the foil in many romantic comedies — Ralph Bellamy in a Cary Grant vehicle, Bill Pullman in “Sleepless in Seattle,” the boyfriend left behind in the city while the heroine reconnects with her small-town roots in various TV Christmas movies. He’s the guy who’s entirely suitable, perfectly sympathetic and yet incapable of inspiring passion or devotion.Or again, to borrow an insight from a friend, DeSantis is an avatar for the generation to which he (like me, just barely) belongs: He’s the type of Generation X-er who pretends to be alienated and rebellious but actually has a settled marriage, a padded résumé, a strong belief in systems and arguments and plans — and a constant middle-aged annoyance at the more vibes-based style of his boomer elders and millennial juniors.The Republican Party in the Trump era has boasted a lot of Gen X leaders, from Cruz and Marco Rubio to Paul Ryan and Haley. But numerically and spiritually, the country belongs to the boomers and millennials, to vibes instead of plans.This might be especially true for a Republican Party that’s becoming more working-class, with more disaffected and lower-information voters, fewer intensely focused consumers of the news, less interest than the Democratic electorate in policy plans and litmus tests. (Though even the Democratic electorate in 2020 opted against its most plans-based candidates in the end, which is why an analogy between DeSantis and Elizabeth Warren has floated around social media.)And it’s definitely true in the narrative context created by Trump’s legal battles, all the multiplying prosecutions, which were clearly the inflection point in DeSantis’s descent from plausible successor to likely also-ran.If a majority or plurality of Republican voters really just wanted a form of Trumpism free of Trump’s roiling personal drama, a version of his administration’s policies without the chaos and constant ammunition given to his enemies, the indictments were the ideal opportunity to break decisively for DeSantis — a figure who, whatever his other faults, seems very unlikely to stuff classified documents in his bathroom or pay hush money to a porn star.But it doesn’t feel at all surprising that, instead, voters seem ready to break decisively for Trump. The prosecutions created an irresistible drama, a theatrical landscape of persecution rather than a quotidian competition between policy positions, a gripping narrative to join rather than a mere list of promises to back. And irresistible theater, not a more effective but lower-drama alternative, appears to be the revealed preference of the Republican coalition, the thing its voters really want.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X and Threads. More

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      Court Papers Offer Glimpse of Trump’s Defense in Classified Documents Case

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      The former president’s lawyers may question whether the documents he took from the White House were related to national defense and whether the country’s security was damaged.Lawyers for former President Donald J. Trump on Friday told the federal judge overseeing his prosecution on charges of mishandling classified documents that they intended to ask the government for new information, including assessments of any damage to national security.The lawyers also told the judge, Aileen M. Cannon, that they planned to ask prosecutors working for the special counsel, Jack Smith, for additional information about how the documents at issue were related to national defense — a requirement of the Espionage Act, one of the statutes that Mr. Trump has been accused of violating. In addition, they said they wanted “tracking information” concerning the classified records.Mr. Trump’s legal team is poised to make the requests on Tuesday, when it files motions asking for additional discovery evidence. This is a standard part of the pretrial process in which the defense seeks to get as much information about the case out of the government as it can. Discovery motions often indicate how lawyers intend to attack charges before a trial begins or how they plan to defend against them once the case goes in front of a jury.The papers filed on Friday suggest Mr. Trump may be planning to attack the multiple Espionage Act counts he is facing by, among other things, questioning whether the documents he took from the White House were actually related to national defense. They also suggest he may seek to downplay how damaging their removal from the White House was to the country’s security.The papers themselves were not discovery motions, but rather a more simple request to use more pages than normal when the motions are due next week. But they did mention the broad categories of information that Mr. Trump’s legal team will seek.Mr. Smith’s team filed its own set of court papers on Friday, telling Judge Cannon that they intended to call several F.B.I. agents to testify at trial concerning data extracted from cellphones and other devices seized from Mr. Trump’s two co-defendants in the case. They are Walt Nauta, a personal aide who served the former president at Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Florida, and Carlos De Oliveira, Mar-a-Lago’s property manager.Some of the data, the papers said, will be used to track for the jury the movements of Mr. Nauta and Mr. De Oliveira during key moments of the investigation. Both men have been charged along with Mr. Trump in a conspiracy to obstruct the government’s repeated attempts to retrieve the classified materials.Mr. Smith also told Judge Cannon about some expert witnesses who will testify about classified material, but that section of the filing was submitted under seal.Until the two sets of papers were filed on Friday, the classified documents case has been relatively quiet in recent weeks and attention has been focused on the other case Mr. Smith has brought against Mr. Trump — one accusing him of plotting to overturn the 2020 election. Last week, Mr. Trump asked a federal appeals court in Washington to toss out the election interference charges, arguing that he was immune to them because they arose from actions he took while in office.The documents case has largely been bogged down in arguments involving a host of classified materials discovered or generated during the investigation that Mr. Smith’s prosecutors believe Mr. Trump should not have access to as part of the discovery process. Mr. Trump’s lawyers responded with a highly unusual request to see a motion that prosecutors filed under seal to Judge Cannon explaining their reasons for keeping that material from Mr. Trump.The case is headed toward an inflection point on March 1, when Judge Cannon has scheduled a hearing in Federal District Court in Fort Pierce, Fla., to discuss when the trial will begin. It is currently set to start on May 20, but late last year Judge Cannon expressed concern that the proceeding might “collide” with the election interference trial, which is set to begin in early March in Washington but could well be delayed.Finding time for all four of Mr. Trump’s criminal trials — there are two more, in New York City and Atlanta — has been a logistical headache. The proceedings need to be scheduled not only in relation to each other, but also against the backdrop of an increasingly busy presidential campaign in which Mr. Trump is the current front-runner to become the Republican nominee.Mr. Trump has consistently sought to delay the trials, hoping he can postpone them until after the election is decided. If he can pull that off and win the race, he could seek to have the federal charges against him dropped and could try to complicate the efforts of local prosecutors to bring him to trial while he is in office. More

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      A Convicted Criminal as the Nominee? Trump’s Rivals Avoid Even Raising It

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      The former president’s legal jeopardy offers an obvious line of attack for Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, but fearing voter blowback, that cudgel remains largely unused.It is an obvious line of attack that has been creeping into the arsenal of rivals trying to stop former President Donald J. Trump ahead of the Iowa caucuses on Monday — if nominated to be the Republican Party’s White House standard-bearer, the former president could very well be a convicted criminal by Election Day.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida inched toward that cudgel at a debate on Wednesday night, warning that a “stacked left-wing D.C. jury” is likely to sit in judgment of Mr. Trump’s efforts to subvert the 2020 election, and asking, “What are the odds that he’s going to get through that?”Then, he added, “what are we going to do as Republicans in terms of who we nominate for president? If Trump is the nominee, it’s going to be about Jan. 6, legal issues, criminal trials.”Former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina has been far more reluctant to broach his legal troubles, speaking almost daily of Mr. Trump as an agent of “chaos” and “disarray” without explicitly mentioning the 91 felony counts looming against him.But perhaps taking their cues from voters leery of attacks on the former president, Mr. Trump’s closest rivals continue to avoid one ominous word: conviction.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, left, and former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina have continued to avoid using one word: conviction.Maansi Srivastava/The New York TimesFor the Republican Party, the reality of Mr. Trump’s legal jeopardy is inescapable, and was underscored on Tuesday when he left the Iowa campaign trail to attend courthouse arguments on whether he can claim absolute legal immunity for any actions taken as president. Regardless of how voters feel about his indictments for subverting the 2020 election, mishandling highly classified documents and falsifying business records to cover up potential sex scandals during the 2016 presidential campaign, one of those cases could go to trial before the election.And a conviction by a jury of his peers after a widely publicized trial could land differently than the indictments themselves, which were dismissed by Mr. Trump and most of his rivals as political efforts by Democrats to interfere with the presidential election.“I actually still believe they will have a trial, and he will be convicted of at least one felony count,” said Asa Hutchinson, a former Arkansas governor and federal prosecutor still pursuing his quest for the Republican presidential nomination. “That puts the Republican Party in jeopardy: a flawed nominee, a historical precedent of a nominee convicted of a felony, and then a loss” in the general election.That might sound like a potent argument for Mr. Trump’s more prominent foes, but many Republican voters don’t want to hear it. On Tuesday morning, at an Irish pub in Waukee, Iowa, Nick and Kadee Miller of Adel, Iowa, were awaiting Ms. Haley when both expressed doubts about the charges facing Mr. Trump. They supported the decisions of Ms. Haley and Mr. DeSantis to steer clear.“I really do believe if you don’t have anything good to say, don’t say anything at all,” said Ms. Miller, a 49-year-old political independent who remains undecided about her choice of candidates.Voters waited for Ms. Haley to speak at Mikey’s Irish Pub in Waukee, Iowa, on Thursday. Polling shows that a growing number of Mr. Trump’s supporters would not want him to be the Republican nominee if he were convicted of a crime.Hilary Swift for The New York TimesSteph Herold, a 62-year-old retiree from West Des Moines, said such negativity spent on Mr. Trump would waste Ms. Haley’s time.“What I love about Nikki is she speaks in facts and truth,” she said. During Mr. Trump’s presidency, “we all reverted back to the middle school playground, beating people up and being bullies. We don’t need more of that.”Bruce Norquist, a 60-year-old cybersecurity analyst from Urbandale, Iowa, was certain a conviction would only bolster Mr. Trump’s support, as the indictments did last year.But that is not what polling shows. Nearly a quarter of Mr. Trump’s own supporters told New York Times/Siena College pollsters in December that he should not be the Republican Party’s nominee if he is found guilty of a crime. Some 20 percent of those who identified themselves as Trump supporters said he should go to prison if convicted of plotting to overturn the 2020 election, and 23 percent of his supporters said in December that they believed he had committed “serious federal crimes,” up from 11 percent in July.“When you put it that way, a convicted felon, no, I don’t want to vote for a convicted felon,” Ms. Miller said, breaking with her husband, who said he would “absolutely” vote for a convicted Mr. Trump “if he could beat Biden.”On Wednesday, at a snow-covered vineyard in Indianola, Iowa, Laura Leszczynski, a 57-year-old security and information technology business owner from St. Mary’s, Iowa, was awaiting the entrepreneur-turned-presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. Still undecided, she conceded she was not well-versed in the cases arrayed against Mr. Trump, but she was not willing to dismiss them.“It just seems like there’s a lot there,” she said. “I’m not a lawyer. I haven’t studied up, but I am worried.”Still, it is perhaps no coincidence that the two Republican candidates who were most ready to raise the prospect of conviction — Mr. Hutchinson and former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey — were seeing single digits or worse in national polling of Republican primary voters before Mr. Christie dropped out of the race on Wednesday.Former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey suspended his candidacy for president during an event in Windham, N.H., on Thursday.Sophie Park for The New York TimesIn his farewell speech in New Hampshire, Mr. Christie returned to the moment in the August Republican primary debate when almost all the candidates on the stage raised their hand when asked if they would vote for Mr. Trump even if he were a convicted criminal.“I want you to imagine for a second if Jefferson, Hamilton, Adams and Washington were frankly sitting here tonight,” he said. “Do you think they could imagine that the country they risked their lives to create would actually be having a conversation about whether a convicted criminal should be president of the United States?”Yet that conversation continues.In an interview on Friday with The Des Moines Register and NBC News, Ms. Haley danced around the prospects of a conviction for nearly three minutes: “He’s innocent until he’s proven guilty,” she said. “He’ll have to figure that out. I don’t have to deal with those court cases.”Mr. DeSantis has been nudging toward acknowledging the danger. In an interview last month with the conservative radio personality Hugh Hewitt, he blamed Mr. Trump’s legal jeopardy on liberals out to get him: “I think it’s very difficult for a Republican, much less Donald Trump, to get a fair shake in front of a D.C. jury,” he said.But as he has made his case against Mr. Trump more aggressively ahead of the Iowa caucuses, Mr. DeSantis has adjusted that argument.“We’re taking a huge risk by empowering a jury of, probably an all-Democrat jury in the nation’s capital, the most Democrat area in the country, to pass a judgment,” he said in the NBC News interview, “because obviously if they rule against him, if they have a verdict against him, that’s going to hurt us in the election.”Nicholas Nehamas More

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      Indicted or Barred From the Ballot: For Trump, Bad News Cements Support

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      The former president has perfected a playbook of victimhood, raising cash off each of his indictments and encouraging Republican officials to defend him, as his rivals did after the Colorado ruling.It may take weeks to find out whether the decision by the Colorado Supreme Court to declare Donald J. Trump ineligible to be on the state primary ballot will hold.But its short-term political impact was clear by the time Mr. Trump stepped off a stage on Tuesday night in Iowa, where he learned of the ruling shortly before a scheduled campaign rally began.Allies of the former president posted on social media that the ruling was an indignation, one that the U.S. Supreme Court needed to rectify.Colorado’s top court found that Mr. Trump had incited an insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, and should be barred from the ballot under the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. Mr. Trump could remain on the ballot regardless — the Colorado justices put their ruling on hold as appeals are likely to proceed — but Mr. Trump’s team was hardly dwelling on that detail.Even if Mr. Trump remains on the ballot, any court having said that Mr. Trump incited an insurrection will be used against him in a general election, in ways his advisers know could be damaging. But the Republican primary is different. Officials with Mr. Trump’s rival G.O.P. campaigns privately feared that the decision would be seen as an overreach by Democrats, one that could bolster his current lead among Republicans in the Iowa caucuses on Jan. 15, and in the primaries immediately after.For years, events that would thwart other politicians have at best slowed Mr. Trump’s forward motion, with the prominent exception of his loss in the 2020 election to Joseph R. Biden Jr. Throughout 2023, Mr. Trump has exploited as political fodder events that would have sunk other candidates — such as being indicted four times, on 91 felony charges — with a Republican electorate that has been told Democrats are threatening their way of life.Since March, Mr. Trump has perfected a playbook of victimhood, raising campaign funds off each indictment and encouraging Republican officials to defend him. Many — including some who are fearful of Mr. Trump’s hold on the party’s core voters — have obliged.Democrats and the comparatively few Republicans who want to see Mr. Trump stopped have described his criminal legal travails as of his own making, and tried to highlight the details of the crimes he is accused of committing. They vary widely and include charges he conspired to defraud the United States with months of election lies aimed at subverting the transfer of power as well as charges stemming from mishandling classified documents.Trump supporters in Waterloo, Iowa, on Tuesday, the day the Colorado Supreme Court barred him from that state’s primary ballot.Rachel Mummey for The New York TimesBut Mr. Trump has repeatedly collapsed all those cases into what he has called a “witch hunt,” one aimed at stopping his candidacy as opposed to holding him accountable. He and his allies are already folding the Colorado ruling into that same narrative.Even people who dislike Mr. Trump intensely feared the ruling to toss him off the ballot will merely help him with a Republican electorate that will see it as interfering with an election, at a time when Mr. Trump is regularly described by Democrats as a threat to democracy.“This vindicates his insistence that this is a political conspiracy to interfere with the election,” Ty Cobb, who worked as a lawyer in the Trump White House and who has since condemned his behavior, told CNN. “That’s the way he tries to sell this,” added Mr. Cobb, who mocked that claim of a broad conspiracy but nonetheless predicted the U.S. Supreme Court might unanimously overturn the Colorado ruling.Mr. Trump’s campaign emailed out that portion of the interview.“REMOVED FROM THE BALLOT — FIGHT BACK!” was the subject line of a second fund-raising email from Mr. Trump later in the night.Mr. Trump said nothing about the ruling at his Iowa rally, as Republicans filled the void for him. His Republican opponents — the few who remain from a once-crowded field — once again were left having to walk a line around the man they’re trying to beat.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who is mocked daily by Mr. Trump’s team for his footwear and who has struggled to replace the former president as the new generation of the MAGA movement, may as well have been articulating Mr. Trump’s own defense in his statement.“The Left invokes ‘democracy’ to justify its use of power, even if it means abusing judicial power to remove a candidate from the ballot based on spurious legal grounds. SCOTUS should reverse,” Mr. DeSantis wrote in a social media post.Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey whose core message has been that Mr. Trump is unfit for office, said that voters, not the courts, should decide whether he is president. Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina who has made significant gains in recent polling, made a similar statement.Vivek Ramaswamy, the most vocally pro-Trump of any of the candidates this cycle, said he would withdraw from the Colorado ballot unless Mr. Trump is restored.Mr. Trump’s team is confident such a restoration will happen. Privately, several of his advisers agreed with Mr. Cobb’s assessment that the U.S. Supreme Court will take up his appeal and side with him. It remains to be seen if that happens, or if the justices decide to let the ruling stand. If they do the latter, similar lawsuits would most likely be filed in other states, although a number of 14th Amendment suits have already failed elsewhere.Regardless of the eventual outcome, Mr. Trump’s team, which was surprised by the Tuesday ruling, made quick work of trying to turn it into another galvanizing moment of victimhood. Their approach echoed something Mr. Trump’s oldest mentor, the ruthless lawyer and fixer Roy M. Cohn, who battled prosecutors himself, once said.“I bring out the worst in my enemies,” Mr. Cohn once told the columnist William Safire, “and that’s how I get them to defeat themselves.” More

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      Trump’s Legal Jeopardy Hasn’t Hurt His G.O.P. Support, Times/Siena Poll Finds

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      Donald J. Trump continues to march to the 2024 Republican presidential nomination with a commanding lead over his primary rivals, even as a strong majority of voters nationwide believe he has committed serious federal crimes, including a growing faction of Republicans, according to a new poll from The New York Times and Siena College.The results show the remarkable degree to which Republican voters are willing to look past Mr. Trump’s legal jeopardy — the former president has been indicted four times in 2023 and faces 91 felony counts — and line up behind his potential return to power.Overall, 58 percent of voters nationwide believe Mr. Trump committed serious federal crimes, according to the survey, including 66 percent of independent voters.Yet Mr. Trump continues to clobber his closest Republican competitors in the primary by more than 50 percentage points, pulling in the support of 64 percent of Republican primary voters nationwide. Nikki Haley, the former United Nations ambassador, is now in a distant second place, with 11 percent, followed by Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who has fallen to third, with 9 percent.The poll was conducted before a court ruling on Tuesday injected more legal uncertainty into the 2024 presidential race. The Colorado Supreme Court ruled that Mr. Trump is disqualified from holding office again because he engaged in insurrection leading up to the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol, a decision the former president plans to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. More

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      Why Judges in the Trump Jan. 6 Trial Need a Rocket Docket

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      If Donald Trump is the Republican nominee for president in 2024, it’s now clear he will likely still have criminal indictments hanging over his head on Election Day. It’s possible that his criminal liability for the events leading up to the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol will remain unresolved.If that happens, voters will go to the polls without knowing whether one of the candidates in the current election is criminally responsible for trying to overturn the last one and subvert the will of the voters.Having an election under such circumstances is unthinkable. As Richard Nixon might have put it, voters have a right to know whether their candidate is a crook. It can be avoided, but it’s going to require the judiciary to take some extraordinary steps. And whether it happens will be decided by a relative handful of federal jurists — including a number appointed by Mr. Trump himself.Of the four criminal cases pending against Mr. Trump, the federal election interference prosecution in Washington currently has the best chance of going to trial before the 2024 presidential vote. The trial date is set for March 4. The Federal District Court judge overseeing the case, Tanya Chutkan, has been doing an admirable job of keeping it on track. But legal developments that are out of her hands now threaten to derail that schedule: Expected pretrial appeals could push the trial date past the November election.Mr. Trump has moved to dismiss the case on various grounds, including claims of presidential immunity and violation of the double jeopardy clause. For most pretrial motions, if the motion is denied, the defendant must wait to raise the issue again on appeal following conviction, if there is one.But these two motions fall into a narrow category of claims that usually entitle a defendant to an interlocutory appeal — in this case, an appeal before trial. Because these are claims of a constitutional right not to be tried at all, a post-conviction appeal is not an adequate remedy. By that time, the right has already been lost. A defendant is allowed to appeal such claims before the government may put him on trial.If, as expected, Judge Chutkan denies these motions, Mr. Trump will have a right to appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. (I expect the appeals will focus primarily on the immunity claim; the double jeopardy argument seems frivolous.) If he loses before a three-judge panel there, he can ask the full court to review that decision. If that fails, he can ask the Supreme Court to review the case. While all that goes on, the trial cannot proceed.In a typical case, an appeals process like this could easily take a year or more. In the first prosecution of Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey, appeals over his claims of constitutional immunity under the speech or debate clause delayed the trial for about 18 months, even with the Supreme Court declining to take the case.In the Trump case, delays like that would push the trial well past November. If Mr. Trump wins the election, he would be able to shut down the two federal prosecutions and could probably have the state prosecutions at least postponed while he is in office.This appears to be the primary defense strategy in Mr. Trump’s criminal cases: delay as much as possible to put off any trials until after next November, when Mr. Trump hopes to be in a position to put an end to his legal problems.Having an election with Mr. Trump on the ballot and his criminal liability for Jan. 6 unresolved could spell disaster for the rule of law. It’s also completely avoidable if the courts — and in particularly, the judges who control the schedule — are willing to do what’s necessary: put the resolution of these motions on a fast track to ensure the case can go to trial as scheduled.Typically, the judicial and political calendars do not intersect. We expect judges to ignore political considerations and campaign schedules when making their decisions. But in times of political crisis, the federal judiciary cannot simply turn a blind eye. It must respond in a way that will enable the political system to address that crisis in a timely manner. This is one of those times.This is not a proposal for the courts to act in a partisan fashion. We don’t know whether Mr. Trump’s claim of immunity will be upheld. If it is rejected, we don’t know what the result of the trial will be. The outcome of the legal process is not the point. The point is that the country deserves to know that outcome before it chooses the next leader of the free world.There is precedent for this kind of judicial rapid response. During Watergate, the appeal of the order for President Nixon to turn over the subpoenaed White House tapes was resolved in only about two months — and that included arguments before and an opinion by the Supreme Court. During the 2000 presidential election, that court heard arguments in Bush v. Gore on Dec. 11 and the very next day issued its opinion shutting down the vote recount in Florida. The usually sedate appellate courts can move with dispatch when they want to.This case requires similar urgency. The initial appeals here could be easily heard and decided within a few weeks. Whether to grant a rehearing before the full Court of Appeals is discretionary, but if it does grant such a hearing, it needs to be equally speedy.After the District of Columbia Circuit rules, the losing party will seek Supreme Court review. If Mr. Trump loses the motions, my own hunch is that the Supreme Court may not take the case. In past disputes the justices have not shown much willingness to go out of their way to help Mr. Trump, and the last thing this embattled court needs right now is to wade into another controversy. But if the court does feel the need to weigh in on these novel constitutional issues, it also needs to move very swiftly.There’s no reason the entire process, including Supreme Court review, could not be completed by January. That would allow the trial date to stay on track if the motions are denied.There’s no concern about Mr. Trump being prejudiced by this relatively breakneck pace. He has vast financial and legal resources. The issues are already fully briefed before Judge Chutkan. The issues are novel — because nothing like Jan. 6 has happened before — but the questions are not extraordinarily complex; we need a rocket docket, but this is not rocket science.Some might argue that voters already have enough information about Mr. Trump’s actions and Jan. 6. But a criminal trial is different. In the aftermath of the 2020 election, Mr. Trump and his allies made repeated claims of voter fraud and a “rigged” election. Those claims uniformly failed when tested in court by the adversary system, where actual evidence is required and witnesses testify under oath. In an age of disinformation and fake news, courts remain the arena where facts still matter.Some voters will not accept the verdict of a criminal trial, no matter what the outcome. But for many it could be a critical data point when casting their ballot.It’s already not possible to have the trial completed before most of the presidential primaries; Super Tuesday, with over a dozen primaries in states and territories across the country, is March 5. Mr. Trump could have the nomination sewn up by the time the trial is over. But the trial could easily be concluded before the Republican convention in July, so the delegates could decide whether they really want to nominate a felon (if that is the outcome) to lead the country.A functioning democracy requires an informed electorate. It’s hard to imagine a more important piece of information for voters to have next November than whether a candidate is criminally culpable for trying to overturn the last presidential election.Our legal system can resolve this case expeditiously while still protecting the defendant’s rights, but the judiciary will have to step up and do its part to protect democracy.Randall. D. Eliason is the former chief of the fraud and public corruption section at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia and teaches white-collar criminal law at George Washington University Law School. He blogs at Sidebarsblog.com.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      in Elections

      Judge Puts Off Decision on Whether to Delay Trump Documents Trial

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      Judge Aileen M. Cannon said she would meet with prosecutors and defense lawyers in March to settle on a schedule for the former president’s trial in federal court in Florida.A federal judge on Friday put off until at least March the fraught and consequential decision of whether to delay the start of former President Donald J. Trump’s trial on charges of illegally holding on to a trove of highly classified national security secrets after he left office.But acknowledging “the evolving complexities” in the proceeding, the judge, Aileen M. Cannon, also said it would be “prudent” to push back several deadlines she had set for pretrial motions to be filed, especially those involving the classified materials at the heart of the case.While Judge Cannon’s ruling left the question of the trial’s timing unresolved, it staked out a temporary middle ground between Mr. Trump’s lawyers and federal prosecutors in the office of the special counsel, Jack Smith.Mr. Trump’s legal team, pursuing a persistent strategy of delay, has repeatedly asked the judge to postpone the trial until after the 2024 election. Prosecutors under Mr. Smith have admitted that the case is complicated, but have asked Judge Cannon to hold the line and stick to the current trial date of May 20.At a hearing last week in Federal District Court in Fort Pierce, Fla., Judge Cannon, who was appointed by Mr. Trump, signaled that she was ready to make some “reasonable adjustments” to the timing of the case. She expressed concern in particular that her trial in Florida might “collide” with Mr. Trump’s other federal trial, a Washington-based proceeding on charges of plotting to overturn the 2020 election that is set to begin in early March.In an order on Friday explaining her decision, Judge Cannon reiterated her concern that the schedules for the two federal trials “as they currently stand overlap substantially.” That, she noted, could make it difficult to ensure that Mr. Trump had “adequate time to prepare for trial and to assist in his defense.”But Judge Cannon also said that Mr. Trump’s legal calendar — he is facing a total of four criminal cases — was “less important at this stage” than the challenges presented by the large volume of discovery evidence that the defense needs to digest. It was also less significant, she said, than the various difficulties involved in handling the sensitive materials at the center of the case under a law known as the Classified Information Procedures Act, or CIPA.Judge Cannon’s ruling left open the chance that the very sort of collision she has worried about might eventually take place. As part of her decision, she set a hearing on March 1 to determine the schedule for her case in Fort Pierce. That is only three days before Mr. Trump’s election subversion case is supposed to begin in Washington.Her ruling also did not foreclose the possibility that she might at some point delay the trial until after the election — a move that would be a major victory for Mr. Trump. Were that to happen, and were Mr. Trump to win the race, he could have the case thrown out entirely simply by ordering his attorney general to drop the charges.Notably absent from Judge Cannon’s ruling was any mention of how the trial calendar might intersect with Mr. Trump’s increasingly busy campaign schedule. It has been a challenge to find ample time for each of Mr. Trump’s four trials not merely in relation to one another, but also against the backdrop of a rapidly approaching set of primary elections and the Republican Party’s nominating convention in July.Judge Cannon chose to ignore Mr. Trump’s political calendar and to focus instead on logistical matters related to the nuts and bolts of the case. She pushed back several of her initial filing deadlines because of delays in constructing a secure facility in which she could review classified materials and because at least one lawyer in the case only recently obtained a full security clearance.She also said she was anticipating that the legal battles between the defense and the prosecution over how many — and precisely which — classified materials should be handed over as part of the discovery process would be “more robust than initially forecasted.”These fights, conducted under CIPA, she said, would require her to conduct a review of a “significant volume of information,” conduct more hearings and consider motions by the defense for additional disclosures. More