More Questions About The Lawfare Strategy

I posted yet again yesterday about my reservations on the White House Lawfare strategy over Trump and the 2024 election, if for no other reason than timing. The plan, as best we can tell, was to indict Trump on several highly complex cases in mid-2023 with the aim of bringing him to trial, ideally with convictions, before the 2024 general election. In fact, the Fulton County RICO case was to start on March 4, the day before the Super Tuesday primaries.

A new report gives more insight into the White House's apparent intent in timing the indictments.

The first indictment [the New York Stormy Daniels case] occurred on April 4, 2023. . . .

On March 17, 2023, Bragg asked for a meeting with federal law enforcement ahead of the Trump indictment Trump, a court source told Fox News. A year earlier, Bragg’s office hired a former senior Department of Justice (DOJ) official Matthew Colangelo, who spent years targeting Trump at the Justice Department. He also attacked Trump in his role in the New York Attorney General’s office.

The second indictment was the Florida federal classified documents case:

Smith filed the second indictment on June 8, 2023. . . .

Months prior, in March, a member of Biden’s counsel’s office met with a top member of Smith’s team, just nine weeks before he indicted Trump in the classified document case, Breitbart News reported.

The third case is the Fulton County RICO case:

Willis filed the third indictment against Trump on August 14, 2023. The official court website of Fulton County, Georgia, published what appeared to be an indictment against Trump before deleting it.

Months before the indictment, Willis’ top county prosecutor met twice with Biden’s White House counsel on May 23 and November 18, 2022, a year before Trump’s August indictment, Breitbart News reported.

The Breitbart report has no information on any White House meetings prior to the fourth indictment, the District of Columbia federal January 6 case, although Jack Smith is the prosecutor in both federal cases.

What strikes me is how little thought, planning, or coordination seems actually to have taken place in the White House regarding these cases. In particular, the ability of any defense to delay any trial, much less highly complex cases of first impression involving issues like presidential immunity on which higher courts have never ruled, makes these proposed schedules absurdly short.

The Breitbart report takes the position that these meetings were improper, but proper or not, they seem to reflect rank incompetence among both White House counsel and the prosecutors in planning out how quickly these cases would proceed and the various appeals, contingencies, and opportunities for delay available to the defense.

The most advance planning that seems to have taken place between White House meeting and indictment in the cases above is the Fulton County RICO case, from May 2022 and August 2023, a little over a year -- but the prosecutor who did the meetings was Nathan Wade, the least experienced of any, and his case is quickly collapsing as we speak.

The federal cases, although they aren't collapsing quite as decisively as the Fulton County case, seem likely to be delayed past their intended schedules. Jack Smith is insisting in the appeals of both cases that the dalays are damaging the government's case:

Smith said Trump’s emergency appeal of the D.C. Circuit’s decision “fails for two interrelated reasons.”

First, Trump “cannot show the requisite likelihood that this Court would reverse the judgment and sustain his extraordinary claim of absolute immunity; and, second, the serious harm to the government — and to the public — of postponing the resolution of the criminal charges against applicant outweighs any equities he can assert to preclude further pre-trial proceedings while he seeks certiorari,” Smith wrote.

I'm having a harder and harder time thinking the lawfare strategy was ever carefully thought out, and the increasing desperation from Jack Smith to keep the slapdash preparations on track strongly suggests this.

And it's hard for me to imagine a lawyer with any sort of experience who wouldn't anticipate Trump's motions to delay the trials.

Indeed, given that, what sort of advice might such a lawyer give his client on the potential schedule for bringing the matter to trial? It looks to me as if the White House simply expected Trump and his attorneys to roll over and cooperate with the schedule they came up with on a truly slapdash and overoptimistic basis.