WASHINGTON – A year that began with the prospect of a federal court reckoning for Donald Trump will conclude without any chance at trial, leaving voters without the finality of an up-or-down jury verdict in the two most consequential cases against the Republican presidential nominee.
Yet both cases — one charging him with illegally hoarding classified documents, the other with trying to overturn his 2020 loss — still loom over the election.
Recommended Videos
Their potential resurgence makes clear that at stake in November’s vote is not only the presidency but potentially Trump’s liberty as he faces the prospect of drawn-out court fights.
A look at why neither case reached trial this year:
Nuclear capabilities and attack plans
The indictment charging Trump with illegally hoarding classified documents contained a series of sensational allegations, including that he cavalierly showed off a Pentagon “plan of attack” and repeatedly enlisted aides and lawyers to help him hide records demanded by investigators.
Prosecutors regarded the national security concerns as self-evident: The documents included nuclear capabilities and the records were strewn haphazardly around Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate, including in his bathroom.
They also saw the evidence as compelling and clear-cut: An audio recording captured Trump boasting of a document that he said he knew was classified, surveillance video showed boxes of records being moved out of a Mar-a-Lago storage room, and grand jury testimony from a Trump lawyer implicated Trump in a scheme to deceive the FBI.
Those factors, taken together, fed the widespread perception that the classified documents case was the most perilous of the four criminal cases that he faced over the past year.
A skeptical judge
Hours before the indictment was unsealed, word came that the case had been assigned to Aileen Cannon, a Trump-appointed judge with limited trial experience based not in the bustling federal courthouse of Miami but in the far quieter city of Fort Pierce two hours north.
This was an unwelcome development for the Justice Department, which had tangled with Cannon less than a year earlier over her decision to grant Trump's request for an independent arbiter to review the classified documents seized by the FBI. That decision was overturned by a unanimous federal appeals panel, which said Cannon had overstepped her bounds.
Cannon's handling of the criminal case drew even more intense scrutiny as she permitted defense motions to pile up, causing interminable delays, and entertained Trump team arguments — including that he was entitled under the Presidential Records Act to take classified documents with him after he left the White House — that prosecutors and legal experts regarded as frivolous. All the while, she squabbled with prosecutors, who grew increasingly exasperated but did not ask for her to be taken off the case.
She indefinitely postponed the trial in May, weeks before it had been set to begin, and then held a multi-day hearing the following month on Trump team arguments that Smith had been illegally appointed because he was appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland and not confirmed by the Senate.
The following month, she made the stunning decision to dismiss the case, endorsing the Trump team's arguments over Smith's appointment.
The Capitol Riot
Trump's efforts to cling to power had been well-documented by the time he was charged with plotting to overturn the 2020 election.
Nonetheless, the case fleshed out additional details about what prosecutors say were Trump's wide-ranging schemes, including his persistent badgering of Vice President Mike Pence to refuse to certify the counting of electoral votes.
The indictment was the product of cooperation, including before the grand jury, of close aides and other targets of Trump's pressure campaign. Trump had sought to block Pence from testifying, citing executive privilege, but a federal appeals court forced the ex-vice president to appear — and the resulting indictment describes notes Pence took about conversations he had with the president.
If the classified documents case seemed fairly straightforward, legally, the election interference prosecution against Trump was anything but. For one thing, the case concerned conduct that Trump took while he was in office, putting prosecutors on legally complicated terrain.
Enter the Supreme Court
Both the trial judge presiding over Trump's election interference case and a federal appeals court decisively swatted away the former president's claims that he was immune from prosecution.
The Supreme Court's conservative majority took a starkly different view.
After rejecting Smith's December 2023 request that it leapfrog a lower court and take up the case immediately, the Supreme Court last April agreed to hear arguments and made clear through the tenor of its questioning that it was skeptical of the charges against Trump — even while not embracing his assertions of absolute immunity.
The result was a landmark 6-3 opinion that conferred broad immunity on former presidents. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that ex-presidents were immune from prosecution for acts within their core constitutional duties, presumptively immune for other official acts and not immune at all for private acts.
The ruling triggered a fiery dissent from Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who said it “makes a mockery” of the principle that “no man is above the law.”
“Because our Constitution does not shield a former president from answering for criminal and treasonous acts, I dissent," she wrote.
The practical effect of the ruling was to narrow the scope of the prosecution, removing from the case allegations related to Trump's efforts to leverage the Justice Department's law enforcement powers to remain in office, and to leave it in the hands of the trial court judge, Tanya Chutkan, as to which other acts in the indictment are not official acts and thus may remain part of the indictment.
The path ahead
Smith's team has appealed Cannon's dismissal of the case to the Atlanta-based 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
It’s unclear when or how the court will rule, but prosecutors in their brief repeatedly stressed that Cannon’s order is a radical break from decades of precedent and stands apart from how judges across the country have ruled on the same question on the legality of special counsel appointments.
Her conclusion that Smith's was illegal because it was made by the attorney general rather than receiving Senate confirmation, they warned, “could jeopardize the longstanding operation of the Justice Department and call into question hundreds of appointments throughout the Executive Branch.”
Assuming the appeals court reverses Cannon, the next big question will be whether it reassigns the case to another judge to carry the proceedings forward.
The election interference case, meanwhile, is continuing in light of the Supreme Court opinion. Though there's no chance of a trial before the election — and possibly no chance of a trial at all in the event that Trump wins and orders the case dismissed.