Plan A Continues To Collapse

Conventional wisdom is very slowly coming to accept that Plan A, securing a conviction in a Trump trial before the election, has effectively disappeared: whatever the outcome of Judge McAfee's decision in the Fulton County RICO case against Trump and his co-defendants, the losing side will appeal. The most conservative prognostications are that the judge will disqualify Wade, the special prosecutor, but not Willis, who would keep her position as DA, but she'd need to find someone new to serve as special prosecutor.

That could be a problem, since Wade had been baked into the process from the start. A second contract prosecutor on the case, Anna Cross, disappeared from the proceedings for unkown reasons after attacking Terrence Bradley on February 16, when it had been assumed she would continue in a lead role. Instead, Adam Abbate, an assistant DA on the regular payroll, was called up from the secnd team to represent the DA's office in Ms Cross's absence; his performance was abysmal:

Closing arguments from prosecutor Adam Abbate have been marked by long pauses and halting answers as he at times struggled to answer questions from Judge Scott McAfee.

In one particularly awkward exchange, McAfee asked Abbate why District Attorney Fani Willis would at first fight her subpoena to testify at last month’s evidentiary hearing, only for her to change her mind and answer questions voluntarily. Abbate cited the very public nature of the hearing and how intrusive many questions were.

So in what looks to be the best case for Willis, if she stays on the case, finding capable prosecutorial talent and bringing them up to speed before the election could be a problem, as the defendants will continue to find reasons for further delay. But if Willis herself is disqualified, the whole case is likely out the window.

Meanwhile, the US Supreme Court's decision to hear Trump's immunity claim will significantly delay the January 6 trial under Judge Chutkan, originally seheduled to start on Monday:

“The surprise is that it took the court the better part of two weeks to reach this result, from which no justice has publicly dissented,” [CNN Supremne Court analyst Steve] Vladeck said. “The justices couldn’t reach consensus on a way to resolve the matter without giving it full briefing and argument.”

“It’s hard to read any tea leaves into whether that makes the court more likely to side with former President Trump when it finally resolves his immunity claim, but it certainly means that, even in the worst-case scenario for Trump, the January 6 prosecution will be delayed for at least another 3-5 months. That’s a pretty big win for Trump even if he ends up losing this case,” Vladeck added.

This drives Politico to wishful thinking:

Almost immediately after the court’s order, a consensus seemed to form among the pundit class: that it will now be impossible for Trump’s trial in Washington to take place before the election. Here is the reality — tentative and messy, perhaps, but true nonetheless: Trump’s trial in Washington can still start before November given the time available on the calendar. Trump’s trial also should start before November given the intense public interest.

. . . Let’s assume, however, that the justices issue a ruling in June that rejects Trump’s bid for immunity, which is what should happen on the merits. The situation at that point will get much more fraught, and it will fall to Chutkan to make some difficult choices with no real precedent.

. . . [I]f Chutkan can manage it, she should hold the line. It should not have fallen to her to make this happen, but if Trump’s criminal case comes back to her this summer from the Supreme Court, she should do her best to put the case on the quickest and most reasonable trial schedule that she can devise, even if some on the Supreme Court are working overtime to help Trump to prevent this from happening.

This set of assumptions has the same flaw as the White House's original lawfare strategy: it assumed that with indictments in mid-2023, one or more cases could come to trial and result in a conviction, if not during the primary season, at least by November. This ignored Murphy's Law on one hand, anything that can go wrong will go wrong, but also the simple nature of the legal system, in which defendants will always try to delay trials, and they often succeed in doing this for years.

Another victim of Plan A's failure is Nikki Haley. A good part of her continued campaigh has been based on a perceived contingency that Trump could in fact still at least come to trial in one or another case before the election, and she could become the fallback candidate, but that contingency seems less likely with each passing day:

When Haley exits the race, which could come as soon as next week, after Super Tuesday, the former U.N. ambassador will have outlasted every other one of Trump’s serious rivals. But her incentives to remain in the race are vanishing, and Haley has only pledged to continue campaigning through Tuesday. Even if Trump were to be sidelined for some non-electoral reason — an unforeseen health event or a conviction in his first criminal trial, which is scheduled to start this month — few Republicans think Haley would be the choice of a majority of delegates at a contested convention.

So far, there doesn't even seem to be a good set of possible alternatives for either the Democrats or never-Trumpers on how to proceed given the current developing circumstances.