- Winning the 2024 election can help Donald Trump in all four of his criminal cases.
- Trump has vowed to fire the special prosecutor who brought two federal cases against him.
- Being president-elect may also help him delay his state cases in Georgia and New York.
Donald Trump‘s presidential victory is also a win as he seeks to resolve his four criminal indictments.
His win may largely free Trump from dealing with his criminal cases for the foreseeable future, experts told Business Insider.
“Setting politics aside, there is a lot at stake legally for Trump” in the November 5 election, former federal prosecutor Neama Rahmani predicted early in the day Tuesday.
Here’s what will happen with Trump’s four criminal cases — two federal and two state — moving forward.
The New York hush-money case
Trump, the first US president convicted of a crime, has a November 26 Manhattan sentencing date on his calendar.
He faces a sentencing range of as little as no jail and as much as four years in prison for his May conviction on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to cover up his $130,000 hush-money payment to the adult film actor Stormy Daniels.
There is a chance the sentencing date will be delayed. Trump has promised to fight his indictment and conviction in New York’s appellate courts. He will likely argue that the evidence in the case includes acts that took place while serving in his official role as president — evidence that would be barred under July’s landmark US Supreme Court presidential immunity decision.
Once he’s sentenced, experts say further appeals could keep a jail sentence on hold for years — though a jail sentence is highly unlikely, a quartet of former New York judges previously told BI.
Winning the presidency could now push things back even further, as Trump could argue he’s too busy running the country to tend to his personal legal issues.
Prior to the election results, Michael Dorf, a Cornell Law School professor, predicted that if Trump won, he would quickly file court papers to delay the sentencing until he is no longer president.
Rahmani, the president and cofounder of West Coast Trial Lawyers, said that he does not believe Trump would be sentenced to jail “regardless of the outcome of the election.”
“Trump winning makes it logistically impossible and a certainty that he won’t receive any time,” Rahmani said.
Trump’s federal cases
Two federal grand juries indicted Trump in cases brought by special counsel Jack Smith. Trump would be eligible for a presidential pardon in both cases, though a self-pardon has never been tried.
Once president, Trump could ask his attorney general to fire Smith. He could also ask the courts to halt the federal prosecutions as there is long-standing Justice Department policy that a sitting president cannot be prosecuted while in office or attempt to pardon himself, said Dorf.
Trump said on a conservative radio interview last month that if elected, he would fire Smith “within two seconds.”
Justice Department regulations stipulate that a special counsel can only be fired for a good cause, but Trump could have his attorney general rescind that regulation, Dorf said.
Firing Smith “is basically his right as president, though I would expect Smith to resign before then, just as a matter of course,” said Michel Paradis, an attorney who teaches national security and constitutional law at Columbia Law School.
The key thing to watch would be what Jack Smith does between Election Day and January 20 to potentially protect those prosecutions from interference,” Paradis said.
“There’s not a lot he can do to make them ironclad since, at the end of the day, the president does control the Justice Department,” Paradis added,
Paradis said that before Trump took the oath of office, Smith could try to stay both proceedings on the grounds that sitting presidents cannot be prosecuted while in office.
Trump has pleaded not guilty to both federal indictments.
Asked for a comment Tuesday afternoon, Steven Cheung, Trump’s campaign spokesman, told BI: “The Lyin’ Kamala Harris – Crooked Joe Biden Witch Hunts against President Trump have imploded just like their failed campaign, and should all be dismissed in light of the Supreme Court’s historic decision on immunity and other vital jurisprudence.
A DOJ spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The federal election-interference case
Even if Trump had lost, Smith’s prosecution of Trump on charges he tried to overturn the 2020 election wouldn’t necessarily have barrelled ahead at full speed.
Citizen Trump could have continued to challenge the election-interference case on the grounds of presidential immunity, experts said.
In July, the US Supreme Court issued a landmark opinion that provides presidents with broad protection from being prosecuted for official acts while in office. The opinion also bars the use of official-act evidence in any prosecution of a former president, even on charges not relating to official acts.
In August, Smith won a revised indictment that narrowed the charges against Trump to cover acts he took as a private, office-seeking citizen.
The federal classified documents case
Another federal case against Trump, in which prosecutors alleged he failed to return classified government documents he took from the White House, was dismissed in July by the Trump-appointed US District Judge Aileen Cannon. She said Smith’s appointment violated the Constitution.
The dismissal, which argues Congress should have approved Smith’s appointment, is now being appealed by Smith in the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. Smith’s appeal revolves around what he calls “the long tradition of special-counsel appointments by Attorneys’ General.”
The Georgia election-interference case
The election interference case in Georgia against Trump and 18 of his associates remains in legal limbo, thanks to the defendants’ efforts to get the Fulton County district attorney, Fani Willis, disqualified from the case.
In May, a Georgia appeals court agreed to consider Trump’s bid to get Willis removed from the case.
Attorneys for Trump and his codefendants argued that Willis had a conflict of interest in the case because she improperly benefited from a romantic relationship with Nathan Wade, the Atlanta lawyer she hired as a special prosecutor.
After an evidentiary hearing earlier this year, a judge ruled that Willis and her office could remain on the case so long as Wade stepped aside, and Wade announced his resignation hours later.
Trump has pleaded not guilty to the Georgia indictment.
If Trump had lost the election, the case could have moved forward, though Trump would likely have moved to get it dismissed based on the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity ruling.
As the election winner, however, he can file papers with the Georgia court “saying you got to put this on hold for the time that I’m president because it’s just not consistent with federal supremacy to have a state prosecuting a sitting president,” Dorf, a constitutional law expert, told BI on Tuesday.
He doesn’t control the prosecutors, so you can’t fire them, and he can’t pardon himself because these are state crimes, so his only option really in the state cases is suspend them,” said Dorf.
November 6, 2024: This story was updated after the election was called for Donald Trump.
