WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — Former President Donald Trump is facing four upcoming criminal trials and each case is experiencing some sort of delay.
"What we're dealing with is all kinds of delays, for one reason or another," Alain Sanders, a professor emeritus at St. Peters University, said.
With delay after delay, the trials of Trump keep inching closer and closer to the November election.
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"So if we're looking at Jack Smith's Jan. 6 case, that's on a pause right now because we're awaiting a ruling from the Supreme Court on Trump's immunity claim," Sanders said. "Arguments in that case won't happen until late next month."
"I think a lot of legal watchers are surprised by this," Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, an associate professor of law at Stetson University, said. "Trump has already lost this argument at the district court level. So there was an option for the Supreme Court to just affirm what the lower courts had done and, instead, we're going to have to reargue all of this in April."
Some legal experts believe that the Supreme Court ruling — deciding whether Trump should be granted presidential immunity in the Jan. 6 case — will affect his federal case in Florida.
"There's a similar motion arguing that the president is immune in the documents case as well," Torres-Spelliscy said. "And so one scale that we will get out of the Supreme Court making a decision on this issue is that the decision will apply both in the Jan. 6 case and in the Mar-a-Lago documents case."
In the classified documents case, Trump and two co-defendants, Trump valet Walt Nauta and Mar-a-Lago maintenance manager Carlos De Oliveira, are accused of mishandling classified documents at Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate on Palm Beach after Trump left the White House.
The case is set to go to trial at the end of May in Fort Pierce, but attorneys on both sides have asked Judge Aileen Cannon for a later date.
"Lots of motions have been presented by Trump's lawyers," Sanders said. "And Judge Cannon is taking, really, her time to decide many of these cases. And many people believe she is slow-walking the case."
Federal prosecutors asked for July and attorneys for the defendants asked for August but said they prefer a date after the November election.
In New York, Trump's hush-money case involving adult film star Stormy Daniels is now on hold as well until at least mid-April.
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"Because the Justice Department, only recently, dumped whole set of documents that might be relevant in the case," Sanders said. "And so both Trump and the Manhattan district attorney asked for a delay while they can sift through these documents."
The election fraud case in Georgia was briefly on pause because of an alleged conflict of interest involving the district attorney, but the judge has since dismissed the issue.
"That took some time and it's going to take some time to get the case back on track," Sanders said. "We've got an election coming up and Donald Trump is charged with very serious felonies. And so there's a public interest in finding out whether he is actually guilty of the accusations that have been made against him."
Trump's attorneys in his New York civil fraud case on Monday told an appellate court he can't post a bond covering the $454 million judgment while he appeals because he can't find an insurance company to underwrite the bond, due by the end of the month.
