Here are 4 ways Trump could walk free
Donald Trump
walked out of a Miami courtroom following his not-guilty plea Tuesday and into a looming thicket of legal peril.
The former president faces a frightful prospect: potentially decades in prison, a de-facto life sentence for a 77-year-old man accused of illegally hoarding, showing off, and lying about top-secret documents. He faces 37 criminal charges in federal court. There are several ways Trump could walk free. They involve a delay, a jury, a judge, and legal arguments touching both procedure and substance. Here are his four potential paths out of legal peril, according to analysts.
Path 1: Delay
Trump has an incentive to punt this case beyond 2024, until after the U.S. presidential election, and hope that either he or an ally is running the Justice Department starting on Jan. 20, 2025. "Delay, delay, delay," is how Cheryl Bader, a law professor at Fordham University in New York, summed up Trump's likely legal strategy, in an interview with CBC News. A Republican president could overturn the case with a pardon — or with the dubious, unprecedented and untested step of Trump trying to pardon
himself, if he runs and wins.
This is destined to become a central election issue for the next 17 months — both in the Republican primaries, and then in the general election if Trump is the nominee. One longshot Republican candidate, Vivek Ramaswamy,
stood outside the courthouse Tuesday and promised a Trump pardon on Day 1 if he's elected president.
Prosecutors say they want a quick case. Holding the trial in Florida might help. The average criminal case length in South Florida is nine months,
half the length of a case in Washington, D.C. "It could be tried as quickly as November of this year," Richard Gregorie, a former Miami prosecutor and assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District of Florida, told CBC News. Emphasis on the word
could. Gregorie added a caveat: If parties want to drag it out beyond the primaries early next year, and into the November general-election season, they can. It depends on how many motions they file and on how many fights there are over evidence. "This could be drawn out for some time," Gregorie said.
Path 2: Fight the evidence
The case sounds devastating. One memorable example from the 49-page indictment is a detailed transcript of a recorded conversation where Trump allegedly incriminates himself. But presumption of innocence is a cornerstone of the U.S. legal system. Trump will challenge the evidence on multiple fronts, as is his right. He's expected to argue that certain evidence is inadmissible. Like notes from his lawyer, which authorities obtained after
convincing a court there was evidence that Trump had been counselling crimes.
He could also try getting the case dismissed. Remarks from him and members of his legal team suggest they'll argue there was
prosecutorial misconduct. Trump lawyers have, in several media interviews, been citing
reports that a lawyer for Trump's personal valet, who is also charged, claimed to face threats from the Justice Department. Their allegation: the valet's lawyer was told that he would lose a judgeship nomination if he didn't persuade his client to turn on Trump and become a witness for the prosecution. "[They] extorted a lawyer," Trump lawyer James Trusty
told Fox News. Last week, Trusty quit working on the case but has been defending Trump in media interviews.
The procedural fights aside, Trump's team will argue against the substance of the case. Trump's allies have been alluding to a broad potential defence: that the president has unlimited power to declassify documents. That power, they allege, is so boundless that the mere act of his taking them from the White House means they're no longer classified. Trump allies have
cited a 1988 Supreme Court
case involving the Navy and a 2012
case involving
Bill Clinton, where a right-wing group sued for access to Clinton audio recordings. This is sheer nonsense, say some legal observers. "Facially ridiculous," is how Trump's former attorney general, William Barr, described the former president's line of defence, in an interview with Fox News.
Trump critics say there's no comparison between others' behaviour and the way he allegedly hoarded – then lied about – documents stamped with top-secret markings. A former Obama-era official also ridiculed it in a
piece for CNN titled: I Wrote The
Declassification Rules, And They Leave Trump Largely Defenseless. Lawrence Douglas, a law professor at Amherst College in Massachusetts, told CBC News: "These aren't arguments that are going to fly at all."
continued...