America's Talking - Trump’s First Criminal Trial Date March 25 in New York

Episode Date: February 16, 2024

Former President Donald Trump’s first criminal trial date, in a case involving porn actress Stormy Daniels, will be March 25. A New York judge rejected a request from Trump to dismiss the case. He faces charges in multiple states while commanding the lead for the Republican nomination in the presidential race. His lawyers, appearing before Judge Juan Manuel Merchan, said the case will interfere with his campaign to return to the White House. Trump has three other prosecutions unresolved, one of which involved a district attorney under heavy scrutiny in Georgia on Thursday. Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/america-in-focus/support Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Greetings and welcome to America in Focus, powered by the Center Square. I'm Dan McAulb, Chief Content Officer at the Franklin News Foundation, publisher of the Center Square Newswire service. Joining me again today is the Center Square's Washington, D.C. Bureau Chief, Casey Harper. How are you, Casey? Doing good, Dan. How are you? I am doing well, thank you. We are recording this on Friday, February 16th. Casey, two big developments this week in the ongoing criminal cases against former President Donald Trump. Trump far and away, the frontrunner for the Republican nomination. for president, and we might even call him the presumptive nominee at this point.

Anyway, Trump faces four completely separate criminal cases against him that really appear to be the only obstacle to him being on the presidential ballot in November. Two of those cases were front and center on Thursday this week. In New York, a judge there rejected a correct request from Trump to dismiss the case involving former porn star Stormy Daniels in which the former president stands accused of falsifying internal records kept by his company, hiding the true nature of so-called hush money payments to Daniels and others. In Atlanta, where Trump stands accused of attempting to overturn election results there, Fulton County District Attorney Fannie Willis,

who brought the charges against Trump and other co-defendants, is accused of having an improper affair with the special prosecutor she hired to investigate Trump. And what can be described as a soap opera-like evidentiary hearing, a combative Willis took the stand to fight and attempt to remove her from prosecuting the case. Casey, let's start in New York, where Trump is now scheduled to go to trial March 25th in just over a month and right in the middle of the presidential campaign season. What does it mean? Yeah, I'm taking notes to keep all these straight, Dan. So, but I think, most Americans are too. I think, you know, what I found really interesting about this, and I think we'll get more into the details maybe of some of these cases. But what I found

really interesting is that often a court case, a looming criminal charge would be a death blow to a presidential campaign. You know, in years past, just one case would be enough to sink a president, a presidential hopeful's ambitions and in this campaign. But in this case, Trump has four, and it's actually done the opposite. If you remember, Trump and DeSantis were in Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in the GOP primary were not quite tied, but DeSantis had a command. competitive race ahead of them. And these charges started dropping in. The FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago happened. And suddenly, Trump soared in the polls and DeSantis really never recovered, right? So the first thing that's interesting about this, and even when you look at some of the pretty, I don't know, I won't use to very unbecoming charges, especially in New York, dealing with a porn star and hush money payments.

And I mean, it's about as bad as it gets when you think about political implications. It hasn't really affected Trump politically. Now, when it comes to the legal side, which we're going to get into, he has some real challenges ahead of him. He also has, you know, the out of Florida, his handling of classified documents where he had those documents in his Florida home. He also has his charges related to his role in the January 6th riots at the U.S. Capitol. So he has a lot of legal problems. But politically, Trump seemed like he's doing back. better than ever, even beating Biden in the swing states. It's a very unusual juxtaposition of a candidate soaring politically, but being weighed down legally. Yeah. And so in the New York case, the Stormy Daniel case, Trump is scheduled to go to trial March 25th. His lawyers argued in trying to dismiss the case that he wouldn't be able to campaign. But after the judge said, sorry, we're going to trial on this, Trump said, I'll be in court during the day, I'll campaign at night. To call it unusual, Casey, is, yeah, is an understatement, I think. The question now becomes- Yeah, I think he's playing into the martyr, the political

martyr, basically. Right. Right. And his Republican base obviously thinks these are all, all of these cases are politically motivated in an attempt to block him from being on the ballot, and an attempt to prevent him from being president again. But so far, that's backfired, according to all the polling that we've seen, including the Center Square's voters' voice polls. So he's faced his trial. If he's convicted, does that hurt his candidacy? I think it could. Polling does show that if Trump is convicted, there is a certain percentage of voters who may abandon him,

who say they couldn't support a president who's been convicted. But then even, Dan, there is the difference between maybe being convicted and sentenced, It's, you know, how long is he going to be in present? Could this be staggered? Can it be delayed just long enough to November? I mean, November is coming quickly. And these criminal cases, especially when you have a big expensive legal team like Trump does, they can really drag this out. I mean, that's part of the reason that you hire a big expensive legal team is to buy time, even if you can't win your case. And so buying time is what these legal teams specialize in. And so I would not surprise me at all if these go beyond November. it's also possible at least one of them is decided before November. So there are certain percentage of voters who will abandon him, but it's just, it's a big question. I think the primary is still wrapped up. I think Republican, most Republican voters are still going to support him, even if convicted. They might tell themselves that he can pardon himself, which is a gigantic legal question, of course. But I think a lot of independents are going to have pause. And that is

when these cases could really hurt him as a general election against President Joe Biden or whoever ends up being the Democrat nominee. Let's switch to the Georgia case, Casey, where the Fulton County, Fulton County, which is the seat of Atlanta, the Fulton County District Attorney, Fannie Willis brought charges against Trump, essentially election interference charges in the state of Georgia. The special prosecutor she hired to investigate those allegations, she and he have had essentially an illicit affair. They claim the affair didn't begin until after she hired him. There's been testimony that the affair was ongoing well before she hired this special investigator, this special

prosecutor. And now Trump is not the only defendant in this case. There's 18 other defendants. And one of the other defendants is attempting to remove her as the chief prosecutor in this case because of this illicit affair. Yesterday, if you didn't see it, there was an evidentiary hearing in this where Fannie Willis took the stand, was extremely combative. And I should say tell listeners, too, there's a second day of hearings today. We're recording this before that second day of hearing, although there's not expected to be any decision in this case. Casey, tell us, summarize briefly what's going on here. Yeah, I mean, you use the word soap opera in the opening for this segment. I think that is

exactly the word that I had in mind. There are receipts. There are allegation. There's a divorce. There is trips to Belize in hotel rooms and government, apparent government spending allegedly on a pretty high, high living affair, you could say. And so what the question for the case is, you know, is, has Fannie Willis disqualified herself by how she's handled government funds, taxpayer dollars related to this case? Now, this all began when it came out that Fannie Willis was dating one of the lawyers that she hired, she used government money to hire some outside help. And just so happens that one of the lawyers that she hired for outside help was the man that she's been seeing romantically. And so, and then they dug more into it. You found out that

that man left his wife recently, apparently to be with Fannie Willis. When you dug more into the numbers, reporters found that this man, Nathan Wade, was making a lot more money than the other lawyers who were hired to help with this case, which was very interesting. I mean, he was making, you know, I think in one case, like hundreds of thousands more on this case so far to do work on it. And then they started digging into receipts and different things, found that there was trips to Belize. And who paid for these trips, who got reimbursed is really the question that'll be

dug into today. And the testimony, Wade said that, well, he, you know, there was reimbursements that happened in cash, Dan, but he never deposited them in the bank account. And then his account it handles all that. So this is a guy who knows the law. He knows, you know, you can't disprove that. But so, I mean, I think that doesn't pass the smell test for a lot of Americans. But they're trying to just make this go away.

But I think there's a lot going on here. And it doesn't really solve. So interesting for Trump, and I'll hand it back to you is this doesn't going to make Trump's case go away, but it will delay it. And that's the biggest benefit to Trump is that this, all these proceedings, all this craziness, this soap opera, as we've called it, has to be resolved before Trump's case can proceed, which who knows how long that's going to take in November, that's that magical time for Trump when he could either become president and get some new authority or at least

try to resolve his legal issues or maybe he kind of goes away once he's not running for president. Casey, we could go on and on about this story, but we are out of time. Listeners can keep up with all developments and more at thecentersquare.com. For Casey Harper, I'm Dan McAulb. please subscribe. Thank you for listening.