SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
Donald Trump is the president-elect of the United States. In fact, the White House announced today that Trump will meet with President Biden in the Oval Office on Wednesday. But Trump is also a convicted felon and a criminal defendant. For the past year on this show and in our Trump’s Trials podcast, we have tried to track and understand the unprecedented situation of a former president and a presidential candidate facing not one, but four serious criminal cases.
(SOUNDBITE OF MONTAGE)
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #1: …That former President Donald J. Trump has been criminally indicted in the state of Georgia…
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #2: Thirty-eight counts against the president.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #3: President Trump has been informed at this hour that he has been indicted by a federal grand jury regarding the special counsel’s probe into Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
DETROW: Ninety-one indictments across four criminal cases at the state level and the federal level. And all along in those segments, we said that this would play out on two tracks, the courts and also the political realm, because if Trump won back the White House, he would have the power to end the federal cases against him, and the state-level cases would likely disappear as well.
And that’s what happened. Trump is returning to power. He’s currently scheduled to be sentenced in New York in just a few weeks, but now that likely won’t happen. To dig more into this, I’m now joined by NPR justice correspondent Carrie Johnson. Hey, Carrie.
CARRIE JOHNSON, BYLINE: Hey, Scott.
DETROW: Let’s start with the two federal cases because Trump will again be in charge of the federal government in January. And remember, these were cases centered around election interference and also a case centered around retaining classified documents after he left the White House. Big question – what happens with these cases?
JOHNSON: You know, we just got a filing from the special counsel, Jack Smith, suggesting the process of unwinding these cases has begun. They asked the judge in Washington, D.C., Tanya Chutkan, to give them until early December to offer a status report or an update because of what they called an extraordinary circumstance. This man who’s been facing four felony charges in Washington D.C. is now the president-elect, and that runs straight into a long-standing DOJ view that you cannot indict or prosecute a sitting president.
DETROW: Let’s talk about the state cases, though. Again, New York State – Donald Trump already faced a jury, was found guilty on 34 felony counts. He was due to be sentenced in a matter of weeks. What happens next in New York?
JOHNSON: Sure. There’s a proceeding scheduled for November 12 for Justice Juan Merchan, the judge who heard that case, to determine whether some or all of that case is impaired because of testimony from people like Hope Hicks who worked in the Trump White House. That calls into question, you know, what the Supreme Court said in its immunity decision this past summer. So that’s one issue.
And then the second issue is the sentencing had been scheduled for Thanksgiving week. Most people think that Donald Trump’s lawyers are going to ask to vacate that sentencing and basically ask for the whole case to go away. You know, it’s really hard to imagine a former president getting a sentence, in custody, anyway, and now it’s extra hard to imagine a president-elect getting a sentence of some kind of custodial time.
DETROW: Let’s talk about the fourth case, Georgia, the case that, topic-wise, overlapped a lot with the federal case having to do with Trump and his allies’ alleged efforts to overturn that 2020 election. What happens there, especially given the fact that it was a RICO case? It was Trump and several other co-defendants?
JOHNSON: Well, you know, that case is already bollocksed up (ph) in part because of allegations against the district attorney Fani Willis. She’s basically fighting allegations that she should be disqualified from the case because she had a personal relationship with the prosecutor she hired and because of statements she made at a Martin Luther King Jr. event at a church in the Atlanta area…
DETROW: Right.
JOHNSON: …This year. And so an appeals court in Georgia was planning to hear all those arguments in early December. It’s not clear to me that’s going to happen, either. There are other defendants in the RICO case in Georgia. It’s not clear to me that the prosecutors in Georgia will want to walk away from these other defendants and the huge RICO case.
DETROW: Yeah.
JOHNSON: But it’s also not clear to me how much the Supreme Court ruling on immunity will impact some of the evidence the prosecutors wanted to use in that Georgia RICO case. There’s a complicating factor there as well, and it’s so complicated, Scott, that it may be that beyond all imagination, Donald Trump’s strategy of delay and deflection has succeeded at every turn in these criminal cases.
DETROW: I want to end on a broad question looking forward. Then I’m wondering what the big storylines you’ll be looking for are, what the biggest questions you’ll have about how far Trump goes in taking those promises that he made into microphones of the campaign trail and turning them into reality.
JOHNSON: Yeah. There are some things that Trump can do almost on Day 1. The huge things include pardons and clemency. A president has almost absolute power to issue pardons and commutations of sentences, letting people out of prison earlier, and how many of the January 6 defendants apply. And whether the leaders of the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys who have been convicted of seditious conspiracy get those pardons and clemencies is a big question.
And then with respect to investigations. the Supreme Court has now blessed and OKed any kind of conversation the president wants to have about investigations or indictments. So in the old days, there was kind of a wall or a series of locked doors so the president and people in the White House couldn’t just call up any old prosecutor at the Justice Department or any old FBI agent and ask questions about investigations, which are extremely sensitive. That wall, I think, is gone now. And so it’s going to be dependent on the character and integrity of the people inside the DOJ and the FBI as to how much meddling or conversations, the President, the White House chief of staff, the White House counsel and others get to have with people doing investigations.
And we’re going to see pretty soon because Trump has avowed retribution. He’s talked about wanting to investigate a lot of his perceived political enemies, and we may see action in those areas depending on who the attorney general is and how quickly that person is confirmed.
DETROW: That’s NPR’s Carrie Johnson. Carrie, thanks so much.
JOHNSON: Thank you.
Copyright © 2024 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
