this post was submitted on 20 Dec 2023
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United States | News & Politics
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Federal courts just move slowly. Any of the current cases against Trump taking less than 6 years would be an anomaly. That's not an endorsement of our current system of justice, far from it.
Trump notoriously uses delay as his primary legal tactic; Has done for decades.
His lawyers have taken every opportunity to take legal actions doomed to "fail" because they knew they would gum up the works and move trial dates further back. They have argued at every turn for delays, and are currently complaining about being told to work over the holidays because a judge gave them strict deadlines for filing briefs in Trump's own appeal which has paused all actions in the case until it is resolved.
(The appeal is that Trump has "absolute immunity" and therefore can't even be tried, let alone convicted, for any crimes he may have committed while president. It's absurd on its face)
The J-6th rioters got court hearings and sentences before Trump was even brought up on charges. That's telling.
Now it's too late and he's the frontrunner. By taking so long they might destabilize the country.
Not at all. Trump’s case is much more difficult and he has used far more delay tactics. It’s a bit similar to preparing a case for a mob boss vs for a foot soldier.
The prosecuted J-6th rioters actually entered the capital building, committed crimes with their own hands on camera, or spent months prior to the insurrection explicitly (in writing) organizing people to do things like kidnap Nancy Peloci and kill Mike Pence.
Those are easier cases to make, and those defendants filling court records with defenses of "I was just following the orders of my president" help build a case against Trump himself.
The "Imminent lawless action" standard in first amendment jurisprudence is a harder one to meet than most people realize. There's reasonable precedent to say that enough time passes between Trump inciting his croud to insurrection and them actually doing it that it doesn't meet the "imminent" standard. It's not in any way an easy case to make and win.
There are many federal and state cases against Trump right now, and to say that they've been intentionally slow-walked to cooencide with the election is to ignore the years of litigation that have already happened in most of them.