Looming Trump trials are throwing judges into an election maelstrom

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Prosecutors pushing for speedy trials and the ex-president’s defense team’s attempts to delay his days in court until after the November 2024 election are setting up a series of critical decisions for jurists in highly politicized cases.

Abigail Jo Shry called the judge’s chambers on August 5 and left a message threatening to “kill anyone who went after former President Trump,” according to a criminal complaint. Three days later, Shry admitted to Department of Homeland Security special agents that she made the call to Chutkan’s chambers but that she “had no plans to travel to Washington, DC or Houston to carry out anything she stated,” the complaint said.

Earlier this week, after the alleged actions detailed in the complaint, Trump criticized Chutkan, an Obama appointee, as “highly partisan” and “very biased & unfair” on his Truth Social network. The post followed a hearing last week in which the judge warned that the tactics used in campaigns could not be allowed to influence the case.

The stunning four criminal indictments of the former president are setting the stage for a campaign like no other as prosecutors vie to get their trials on a 2024 calendar filled with nominating contests and other rituals of an election year.

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, for example, on Wednesday asked for a trial to begin in Georgia on March 4 for her case against the ex-president and 18 co-defendants charged with a vast conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election in the critical swing state. That date falls just a day before Super Tuesday — one of the most critical moments of the Republican primary. Her request followed special counsel Jack Smith’s aggressive push for a trial to start on January 2 in his federal case regarding Trump’s election subversion effort — which would be just two weeks before the GOP’s first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses.

Both these dates are among the most crucial in the Republican nominating calendar and will go a long way to showing whether…

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