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He's always there! Right? And you know exactly who I mean. I just Googled him and the latest news at this very second, though undoubtedly not 30 seconds from now, is that he's asked the New York judge in the civil fraud trial he recently lost -- a mere $355 million judgment for inflating the value of his properties (full cost $454 million), a sum rising by $87,502 a day until he pays -- to delay the enforcement of that judgment for a month. Oh, and while he was at it, he started comparing himself to the dead Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny. "It is a form of Navalny," he insisted, speaking about his situation. And then, focusing on himself, of course, not the Russian dissident, he added: "And it's a horrible thing. But it's happening in our country too. We are turning into a communist country in many ways. And if you look at it, I'm the leading candidate, I got indicted" I got indicted four times, I have eight or nine trials" all because of the facts that I'm in politics."
You undoubtedly didn't know that Joe Biden and crew were commies (and they probably didn't either), but now you do (even if they don't). And perhaps you know, too, that a group of 154 American historians and presidential experts recently ranked The Donald as the worst president in American history, a singular honor when you think about it. No middle of the pack like Biden (#14) for him! And imagine this: the worst president in our history, the man who, on December 19, 2020, tweeted "Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 Election," and then announced a "Big protest in D.C. on January 6th" and invited his fans to Washington ("Be there! Will be wild!), is today leading in numerous polls for the 2024 presidential election.
Honestly, you couldn't make this stuff up. It would be too absurd. And yet perhaps all of this would be different if, unlike his civil cases in New York, the American criminal justice system, state and national, worked just a tad better. As TomDispatch regular Karen Greenberg points out today, when it comes to criminal justice, delay is the name of the game and not just in regard to our former president. All too sadly, it could add a distinct "in" to justice, American-style. Tom
Trump's Justice
Justice Delayed Is Democracy Denied
In 1868, British Prime Minister William Gladstone famously said, "Justice delayed is justice denied." The phrase has often been repeated here in the United States, most famously by the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., who echoed it in his 1963 "Letter from a Birmingham Jail": "Justice too long delayed is justice denied."
Sadly enough, justice delayed (and possibly denied) is once again front and center in America as we face the specter of Donald Trump and his insistence on eternally evading the reach of the law. What's at stake isn't just the fate of the former president, but an essential aspect of democracy.
The Georgia Case
Recently, the country was privy to attempts by Donald Trump's lawyers to delay, if not completely derail, legal proceedings in a Georgia courtroom where Trump faces 13 felony counts for, in essence, trying to steal an election. In a hearing linked to that Georgia election interference case, originally scheduled to begin in August, a team of Trump defense attorneys attempted to remove prosecuting District Attorney Fani Willis from the case. The defense team has argued that Willis was not only having an affair with a man she had appointed as lead prosecutor in that case but had gained financially from doing so.
Should the judge indeed order her removed, the trial could be delayed until well past the November presidential election and might never take place at all. A new prosecutor could decide not to bring charges against Trump and his 14 co-defendants, and even finding one could prove painfully difficult, given the size, complexity, and cost of the case. According to NBC News politics reporter Dareh Gregorian, it would be a "massive undertaking." Not to mention that selecting a new prosecutor could spark all sorts of internal politics in the Georgia justice system. The "delay," in other words, could well amount to an utter defeat. Originally scheduled to be decided before the 2024 presidential election, the trial would, at best, be postponed into the distant future and might never take place.
And that's not the only case in which Trump's team is deploying a strategy of delay in the service of strangling future legal proceedings.
The Jack Smith Federal Cases
Special Counsel Jack Smith -- appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland in November 2022 after more than a year of persistent calls for an investigation into the January 6th insurrection -- has mounted two federal criminal cases against Trump. One involves classified documents he took back to his Mar-a-Lago estate and refused to return. It's now before a Florida federal court (and a Trump-appointed judge). The other is the January 6th election interference case taking place in Washington, D.C. Both have repeatedly succumbed to "assorted motions and maneuvers" of delay, as Mother Jones columnist David Corn aptly puts it.
In truth, delay has been front and center in each case. Only recently, Trump's lawyers petitioned the Supreme Court to put Smith's potentially devastating election interference case on hold while the former president appealed a lower court ruling that he doesn't have presidential immunity from federal prosecution. He has now filed an appeal with the Supreme Court, asking the justices to determine whether or not he indeed does have immunity. This comes after the D.C. appellate court took over a month to issue its decision, just one more way in which timeliness has been left in the lurch at a moment when time should be of the essence.
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