The January 26, 2024 Morning Memo at Talking Points Memo is not cheery reading.
Some excerpts from David Kurtz:
In retrospect, I came into the Trump era with way too much confidence that the legal system was up to the task. The last eight years have been humbling in that regard.
As a lawyer-turned-editor, I cautioned my reporting team not to be impatient with the pace and deliberation of legal processes. These things take time. Don’t be hot-headed about it. Chill out. Let things run their course.
That was then; this is now:
...Some individual jurists, like U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who only got the Trump Jan. 6 case last August, have performed admirably. The legal system as a whole has not. The former chief judge in DC warned last fall that we are “at a crossroads teetering on the brink of authoritarianism.” During the sentencing yesterday of Trump White House official Peter Navarro, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta called bullshit on it being a “political prosecution.” Also yesterday, in the sentencing of a Jan. 6 rioter, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth, a long-serving Reagan appointee, let it rip:
The Court is accustomed to defendants who refuse to accept that they did anything wrong. But in my thirty-seven years on the bench, I cannot recall a time when such meritless justifications of criminal activity have gone mainstream. I have been dismayed to see distortions and outright falsehoods seep into the public consciousness. I have been shocked to watch some public figures try to rewrite history, claiming rioters behaved “in an orderly fashion” like ordinary tourists, or martyrizing convicted January 6 defendants as “political prisoners” or even, incredibly, “hostages.” That is all preposterous. But the Court fears that such destructive, misguided rhetoric could presage further danger to our country.
Six months ago, expectations were that Trump would be facing trial and that would be the big story around this time, not his seeming coronation after just two primaries. Now the prospect is this:
The Mar-a-Lago case is almost guaranteed to happen after the election. So is the Georgia RICO case. The Jan. 6 case is stuck on pretrial appeals, with the DC Circuit and Supreme Court failing to push things along. The lesser of the four cases – the hush money case in New York – may be the only one tried before the election. Meanwhile, there’s a chance Trump will be brought down by the Disqualification Clause but no one is confident the courts will enforce that against him either.
If we were counting on guilty verdicts before the election, these major cases are not likely to deliver. The E. Jean Carroll damage awards on top of the rape judgement are some help. The judgement should be coming down soon in the New York State Fraud Trial — and Trump could end up paying $370 million and be barred from doing business in New York State.
As with the Carroll verdict, Trump will probably avoid paying anything until he exhausts every appeal though. It’s likely to take years to wind through the courts.
Kurtz is now at the “hair on fire” stage over the slowness of the judicial system in the face of the critical urgency of holding Trump to account in a timely manner. Trump has been openly contemptuous of the courts all along; he’s built his business on evading legal consequences. Between intimidation and playing the legal system, Trump is still a long way from facing justice.