What happens to Trump's criminal cases now that he's won re-election?
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Hey, this is Scott Detrow. For today's Consider This, we're going to bring you an episode of the other podcast I host, Trump's Trials. Here it is. From NPR, this is Trump's Trials. I'm Scott Detrow. This is a persecution. He actually just stormed out of the courtroom. Innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.

We have been bringing you this podcast for more than a year now, and we have tried to track and understand the unprecedented situation of a former president and a presidential candidate facing not one, but four serious criminal cases. That former president, Donald J. Trump, has been criminally indicted in the state of Georgia. 38 counts against the president, including the unlawful retention of defense information, which is an espionage act.

charge.

There are also charges of obstruction and conspiracy. Former President Trump has been informed at this hour that he has been indicted by a federal grand jury regarding the special counsel's probe into Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Donald Trump has been indicted by a grand jury in New York. Ninety one indictments across four criminal cases at the state level, at the federal level. And all along, we said this would play out on two tracks, the courts and also the political realm.

Because if Donald Trump won back the White House, he would have the power to end the federal cases against him. And the state-level cases would likely disappear as well. And that's what happened. Trump is returning to power. He is scheduled, as of this moment, to be sentenced to New York in a matter of weeks. But now that likely will not happen. So ahead, we will talk about all of this and what comes next for Trump and the Department of Justice with correspondent Kerry Johnson.

And we are back with NPR justice correspondent Carrie Johnson. Hey, Carrie. Hey, Scott. Let's start with the two federal cases because Trump will again be in charge of the federal government in January. And remember, these were cases centered around election interference and also a case centered around retaining classified documents after he left the White House.

Big question. What happens with these cases? You know, we just got a filing from the special counsel, Jack Smith, suggesting the process of unwinding these cases has begun. They asked the judge in Washington, D.C., Tanya Chutkin, to give them until early December to offer a status report or an update because of what they called an extraordinary circumstance.

This man who's been facing four felony charges in Washington, D.C., is now the president-elect. And that runs straight into a longstanding DOJ view that you cannot indict or prosecute a sitting president. One thing that I particularly noticed from that filing was that Jack Smith made a point to say that Trump will become president on January 20th and also pointed out he will be certified as president.

on January 6, 2025. Yeah, and that date, of course, plays a major role in not just the public imagination, but also in the indictment against the former president, Donald Trump. When a high-profile special counsel ends an investigation, often there will be a report issued. We saw this with the Her report, which was an early alarm bell for many people about President Joe Biden's age and the way that he carried himself.

Any sense whether something similar could come out of Jack Smith's office? That's a requirement under the special counsel regulations. So Smith will at least start writing a report. The question is whether he's going to be able to finish it in time before the inauguration. The current attorney general, Merrick Garland, has pledged to make public most, if not all, of these special counsel reports. So if that gets done in time...

and Merrick Garland has time to review it and publish it to all of us, we're going to see it. It's a big question how much new information is going to be in there, especially because we just got 165 pages from Jack Smith not that long ago talking about what Donald Trump was doing in the room off of the Oval Office while the January 6th riot proceeded. Right. On top of the original indictments, the refiled indictments, half the Supreme Court rulings, and of course, the congressional hearing. I feel like many of the key facts were out there. What

which, again, I think is something that Americans took into consideration. And yet Donald Trump won the popular vote. Resoundingly. Not even close. Yeah. Let's talk about the state cases, though. Again, New York State, Donald Trump already faced a jury, was found guilty on 34 felony counts. He was due to be sentenced in a matter of weeks. What happens next in New York? Sure. There's a proceeding scheduled for November 12th.

For Justice Juan Merchan, the judge who heard that case, to determine whether some or all of that case is impaired because of testimony from people like Hope Hicks, who worked in the Trump White House, that calls into question, you know, what the Supreme Court said in its immunity decision this past summer.

So that's one issue. And then the second issue is the sentencing had been scheduled for Thanksgiving week. Most people think that Donald Trump's lawyers are going to ask to vacate that sentencing and basically ask for the whole case to go away. You know, it's really hard to imagine a former president getting a sentence in custody anyway. And now it's.

extra hard to imagine a president-elect getting a sentence of some kind of custodial time. Even being forced to report to probation, his lawyers would say, is too much because he's got to think about the transition period and launching the new government. And as the Supreme Court told us this summer, the executive branch is the president. And so it's different when it's the president. Let's talk about the fourth case.

Georgia, the case that topic-wise overlapped a lot with the federal case having to do with Trump and his allies' alleged efforts to overturn that 2020 election.

What happens there, especially given the fact that it was a RICO case? It was Trump and several other co-defendants. Well, you know, that case is already bollocked up in part because of allegations against the district attorney, Fannie Willis. She's basically fighting allegations that she should be disqualified from the case because she had a personal relationship with the district attorney.

with the prosecutor she hired and because of statements she made at a Martin Luther King Jr. event at a church in the Atlanta area this year. And so an appeals court in Georgia was planning to hear all those arguments in early December. It's not clear to me that's going to happen either. There are other defendants in the Rico case in Georgia and there are other defendants in the Mar-a-Lago prosecution over the alleged hoarding of classified documents and alleged obstruction when the FBI came to get them. And

I think the evaluation in the federal case involves, of course, not just Trump, but his valet, Walt Nauta. We've talked about him a lot. And Carlos de Oliveira, the property manager at Mar-a-Lago. The federal government may well decide to walk away from those two men. It's not clear to me that the prosecutors in Georgia will want to walk away from these other defendants and the huge RICO case. Yeah.

But it's also not clear to me how much the Supreme Court ruling on immunity will impact some of the evidence the prosecutors wanted to use in that Georgia recode case. There's a complicating factor there as well. And it's so complicated, Scott, that it may be that beyond all imagination, Donald Trump's strategy of delay and deflection has succeeded at every turn in these criminal cases. Given the fact that Donald Trump is returning to the White House after a clear-cut victory

I have to imagine, Kerry, that there are a lot of conversations in the Department of Justice and legal worlds about how this could have gone differently. There were always going to be headwinds, right? Like the big federal case regarding the election in January 6th was paused. The spring made its way to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court issues this broad ruling granting wide swaths of immunity to presidents.

Even given those dynamics that probably would have been in place no matter what, what are the conversations like, especially when it comes to timing? How much conversation is there about whether the Department of Justice could have begun this process faster, could have brought charges against Trump faster and reached a conclusion in a courtroom before this election? There's a lot of second guessing. There's a lot of Monday morning quarterbacking, particularly as it relates to the House Select Committee that investigated a lot of this January 6th activity, right? I mean,

Even members of that committee and some of the senior staff have been quite critical of the Justice Department for moving too slowly. Another thing that's going on here, I think, is that the Attorney General Merrick Garland has become the personification of the justice system for people. And so like every time people on the political left were unhappy about things in Georgia or New York getting off track,

They'd complain about Merrick Garland. In fact, the attorney general of the United States doesn't have anything to do with the prosecutions in New York or Georgia. Something President-elect Trump frequently mistook as well. Exactly, exactly.

That all being said, Scott, even if Garland had appointed a special counsel earlier and charges against Trump related to January 6th were brought, it's not at all clear to me that this Supreme Court would have allowed the core of that case to proceed. In fact, the Supreme Court decision in the Trump immunity case was so obvious.

sweeping as it relates to executive power, that it touched not just the D.C. case we've been talking about, but all four of these cases in some respect. And so coulda, woulda, shoulda. I think when people look back 20, 30 years from now, Merrick Garland's legacy is in large part going to be shaped by what happened at this case against Trump and the other January 6th cases.

I want to end on a broad question looking forward, Kerry. You are one of the best people in the country at covering the Department of Justice. You're a really well-sourced reporter there. You covered Trump's first time in office. You covered these criminal charges brought against a former president. You covered all of the things that Trump has promised to do if he returned to office, especially when it comes to using the Department of Justice in a political way, going after political opponents.

Now he's coming back into office. And I'm wondering what the big storylines you'll be looking for are, what the biggest questions you'll have about how far Trump goes in taking those promises that he made into microphones of the campaign trail and turning them to reality. Yeah, there are some things that Trump can do almost on day one. The huge things...

include pardons and clemency. A president has almost absolute power to issue pardons and commutations of sentences, letting people out of prison earlier. And how many of the January 6th defendants apply and whether the leaders of the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys who have been convicted of seditious conspiracy get those pardons and clemencies is a big question. And then with respect to investigations,

The Supreme Court has now blessed and okayed any kind of conversation the president wants to have about investigations or indictments. So in the old days, there was kind of a wall or a series of locked doors. So the president and people in the White House couldn't just call up any old prosecutor at the Justice Department or any old FBI agent and ask questions about investigations, which are extremely sensitive.

And so it's going to be dependent on the character and integrity of the people inside the DOJ and the FBI as to how much meddling or conversations the president, the White House chief of staff, the White House counsel and others get to have with people doing investigations. And we're going to see pretty soon because Trump has avowed recidivism.

retribution. He's talked about wanting to investigate a lot of his perceived political enemies. And we may see action in those areas, you know, depending on who the attorney general is and how quickly that person is confirmed. That appears Kerry Johnson. Kerry, thanks so much. Thank you.

Thanks to our supporters who hear the show sponsor free. If that is not you, still could be. You can sign up at plus.npr.org or subscribe on our show page and Apple podcasts. This show is produced by Tyler Bartleman, edited by Adam Rainey, Krishna Dev Kalamar and Steve Drummond. Our executive producers are Beth Donovan and Sammy Yenigan. Eric Maripoti is NPR's vice president of news programming. I'm Scott Detrow. Thanks for listening to Trump's Trials from NPR.