The self-inflicted wounds among former President Donald Trump’s legal persecutors are working to his advantage and potentially pushing a politically crippling judgment beyond the November election.
Judge Scott McAfee, presiding in Atlanta, ruled Friday that Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis could continue prosecuting Mr. Trump over his 2020 election challenges but the “appearance of impropriety” demanded that either she or her ex-boyfriend Nathan Wade exit the case, giving the former president fuel to fire up his base.
Within hours, Mr. Wade quit the team “in the interest of democracy.”
Ms. Willis’ unforced error shifted the spotlight away from Mr. Trump and toward her personal life. The ordeal is expected to slow down the case against Mr. Trump, who leaned on Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to find enough 2020 votes to give him a state victory.
“That’s all self-inflicted wounds down there for what some of us thought was the strong case. You’ve got a tape recording of him talking to the secretary of state,” said David Schultz, a distinguished professor of politics and legal studies at Hamline University in Minnesota. “He’s generally done well, but he benefits from the missteps and gotten help from the Supreme Court.”
In New York, a hush-money trial set to begin March 25 could be delayed at least a month because Mr. Trump’s attorneys complained that prosecutors failed to hand over critical evidence.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg agreed to a 30-day delay so Mr. Trump’s defense would have sufficient time to review the new material. Mr. Trump wasted little time using the delay to his rhetorical advantage on the campaign trail.
“They illegally withheld thousands of pages of documents,” he wrote on Truth Social. “This will make Fani and her ‘lover’ look like small potatoes!!!”
Some developments haven’t gone Mr. Trump’s way.
Ms. Willis can forge ahead on the Georgia case even though she has lost momentum, and a federal judge in Florida refused to dismiss an indictment over Mr. Trump’s hoarding of sensitive government documents after defense attorneys complained about the vagueness of a World War I-era law wielded against him.
Still, the federal trial in Florida is unlikely to start in May as planned, and special counsel Jack Smith’s attempt to put Mr. Trump on trial in March over his post-election actions was blown to smithereens by the Supreme Court’s decision to take up Mr. Trump’s claim of presidential immunity for election-related actions he took in the final days of his term.
The postponements suggest Mr. Trump’s attack-and-delay strategy is working.
“It will work if he avoids any conviction between now and November. What polling shows is that one thing that would turn a sizable portion of the electorate against him is an actual conviction,” said Charles S. Bullock III, a politics professor at the University of Georgia.
These voters “are not the MAGA red-hat wearers,” Mr. Bullock said. “These are Republicans who are generally going to vote Republican and would still prefer [Trump] to Biden.”
A conviction, he said, could “shake their faith.”
No trial date has been set for the case in Georgia, which alleges that Mr. Trump and 18 co-defendants violated state racketeering laws with a plot to overturn Joseph R. Biden’s 2020 win in the Southern state.
A grand jury indicted Mr. Trump and his associates last year, but it seemed for months that Ms. Willis and Mr. Wade were on trial.
Trump co-defendant Michael Roman filed a bombshell motion saying Ms. Willis had a romantic relationship with Mr. Wade, who was hired as a special prosecutor in November 2021.
Defense attorneys said the pair had an impermissible financial incentive to pursue the prosecution.
Judge McAfee concluded that Ms. Willis had no financial conflict meriting disqualification from the state racketeering case. Still, he dinged the prosecutorial pair for creating a “financial cloud of impropriety and potential untruthfulness.”
He scolded Ms. Willis for suggesting in a church speech to a majority-Black congregation around Martin Luther King Jr. Day that criticism of Mr. Wade was racially motivated.
Mr. Trump’s attorney Steve Sadow said Friday that he plans to trip up the prosecution wherever possible.
“While respecting the Court’s decision, we believe that the Court did not afford appropriate significance to the prosecutorial misconduct of Willis and Wade, including the financial benefits, testifying untruthfully about when their personal relationship began, as well as Willis’ extrajudicial MLK ‘church speech,’ where she played the race card and falsely accused the defendants and their counsel of racism,” Mr. Sadow said. “We will use all legal options available as we continue to fight to end this case, which should never have been brought in the first place.”
Mr. Trump says the criminal cases against him are part of a Democratic plot to thwart his presidential bid.
If he wins the election, Mr. Trump could try to pardon himself for federal offenses or claim he cannot be prosecuted while he performs his presidential duties. Legal scholars question whether a president can pardon himself.
“We’ve got a couple of open questions here,” Mr. Schultz said. “Whether a sitting president can face a criminal trial, and if a sitting president can get delay for a criminal trial that takes place at the state level.”
• Tom Howell Jr. can be reached at thowell@washingtontimes.com.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.