All Of A Sudden, The Trump Trial Is Slowing Down

Let's recall that a week ago, Judge Merchan wasn't going to let Trump take any days off from his New York trial:

The New York judge overseeing former President Trump’s hush money trial said Monday that Trump cannot attend arguments on presidential immunity at the Supreme Court next week.

It came after the judge earlier delayed a decision on allowing Trump to attend his son Barron’s high school graduation in May.

The attempts by Trump to take off certain days of his hush money trial that is expected to last weeks, if not months, came as the first day of trial was officially underway in Manhattan.

. . . “Arguing before the Supreme Court is a big deal, and I can certainly appreciate why your client would want to be there, but a trial in New York Supreme Court . . . is also a big deal,” Judge Juan Merchan said to Trump lawyer Todd Blanche, rejecting his request to let the former president play hooky.

“I will see him here next week,” the judge added.

While the judge clearly implied the trial should have the highest priority, at least for Trump's time, so far, it's been held only three-and-a-half days a week, and next week looks like it will be even less. On Friday, the trial broke for the weekend and will return on Tuesday at 9:30 am. Wait a moment. What happened to Monday? I've looked for the reason the judge is taking Monday off and can't find any.

I've been a juror in two criminal trials myself, and I've reported on several civil trials as a blogger-journalist at my old blog. Judges normally want to move things along, and there's normally a morning and afternoon session five days a week, with judges threatening to go longer if things don't move on schedule. This past week with Judge Merchan, there was an early quit for a juror's toothache Monday, a delay for a contempt hearing Tuesday morning, and another early quit later that day for Passover.

My experience of judges has been that with those initial delays, Judge Merchan would be eager to move things along, but no -- now no trial Monday, no reason given. On top of that, he'd originally scheduled another hearing on Trump's contempt charges for this coming Wednesday, a day he'd previously reserved for other business without a trial that day, but now he's moved the hearing to Thursday, which would normally be a trial day.

With a decision on one contempt motion pending, Judge Juan Merchan has scheduled a hearing on Thursday for prosecutors to argue that Trump has committed more violations of the judge’s gag order against disparaging or intimidating witnesses, jurors and other trial participants.

At the first contempt hearing on Tuesday [April 23], prosecutors sought fines for ten Trump online posts blasting witnesses Stormy Daniels and Michael Cohen and calling prospective jurors “liberal activists.” Assistant Manhattan District Attorney Chris Conroy said that next week’s hearing will cover four more alleged gag-order violations.

So in the coming week, we've got Monday off for an unknown reason, at least part of Thursday taken up by a contempt hearing, which had previously been scheduled for the normal Wednesday off day. So it looks like at best, next week will be maybe two and a half days of trial, Tuesday, part of Thursday, and Friday, that is, unless somebody else has a toothache. This is worse, not better, than last week. This is simply not my experience of trials. Just this past Wednesday, I cited the American Bar Association's statement on the Special Functions of the Trial Judge:

(a) The trial judge has the obligation to avoid delays, continuances, and extended recesses, except for good cause. In the matter of punctuality, the observance of scheduled court hours, and the use of working time, the trial judge should be an exemplar for all other persons engaged in the criminal case. The judge should require punctuality and optimum use of working time from all such persons.

These new delays, while they continue to make me question whether Judge Merchan is in over his head, also lead me to ask if there might be another reason behind them. For instance, Jonathan Turley commented on Fox,

He says Trump's defense attorneys

are doing a good job, largely allowinmg the case to collapse on its own weight. This case thus far is about as good a model for prosecution as the Titanic is a good model for navigation. I don't understand why they would start with Pecker. In my view he is disastrous. First of all, I'm speaking as a criminal defense attorney. What most good prosecutors, if they know the criminal defense attorney will bring up something damaging, will bring it up themselves. The most damaging aspect of Pecker's testimony is that he did the same thing with a wide variety of celebrities. That is really quite damaging, and by not revealing that to the jury in your direct, there is a sense that there was some hiding of the ball here. You can lose credibility with the jury. That is really quite remarkable.

In fact, there seems to be a consensus of commentators outside legacy media that the trial isn't going as expected, with others pointing out that the defense had been able to establish that "Catch and Kill" was a common business practice employed by celebrity publicists and was not a crime.

However, a web search for accounts of Friday's trial brings up mostly references from ABC, NBC, CBS, the Washington Post, and the New York Times suggesting, for instance,

Former presidents typically spend their post-White House years writing memoirs, making well-paid speeches and cementing their place in history. By becoming the first former president to face criminal trial, Trump is instead sitting in court, watching someone else try to define his legacy even as he campaigns for a second term in the Oval Office.

Over four days of testimony this week, former National Enquirer executive David Pecker told the jury not just how deeply involved Trump’s team was in using the supermarket tabloid to fuel his 2016 presidential campaign, but also how celebrities and politicians generally try to buy, trade or bully their way out of scandalous stories.

But all the accounts minimize that Pecker testified he had been doing this for many years, for celebrities who were not presidential candidates, and indeed for Trump himself when he was a celebrity with no political ambitions -- and none of this was a crime.

It's hard for me not to think that Merchan has concluded -- or actually, since the guy seems pretty obtuse, he's been told -- that the trial isn't going as planned, he needs to take the spotlight off the testimony in the trial and redirect it to the contempt hearing. Although we keep hearng the trial is expected to last six to eight weeks, with Pecker, the prosecution's best witness, failing to build a basis for the subsequent testimony of Michael Cohen and Stormy Daniels, who will likely be chewed up by the defense, I'm not sure it can go that long. This may be another reason for Judge Merchan to slow things down.

Let's keep in mind that over the past months, the New York hush money case was regarded as the least important and weakest of Trump's four pending trials. More recently, it's developed that at minimum, none of the other three now seems likely to begin before November, with the possibility that the US Supreme Court may eliminate them in a decision on presidential immunity, or they may be dismissed for other reasons.

As a result, it looks as though the New York case is the last hope for the Biden campaign to be able to campaign against Trump as a "convicted felon" -- but even this possibility is beginning to recede. So they're now casting about for a Plan B -- if they can't get a guilty verdict from the jury, at least they can somehow pile up contempt charges. Thus the delay and Thursday's big contempt hearing. We'll have to see how this goes.