Two courtroom dramas 700 miles apart arising from Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the last election conjured a preview of the most tortured campaign season of modern times next year.
In Washington, DC, a federal judge set a trial date for the former president’s federal election subversion case for March 4 – a day before the Super Tuesday primaries that will hand out a huge portion of the delegates Trump needs to win the GOP nomination. Currently the front-runner for the GOP nomination, Trump has already pleaded not guilty in a case he’s slammed as 2024 election interference. But Judge Tanya Chutkan’s decision increased the possibility that the Republican Party will nominate a convicted felon.
While the country was getting its head around that previously unthinkable scenario, Trump’s former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, was on the stand in Georgia in a risky attempt to extricate himself from a separate state racketeering case in which he is charged along with Trump and 17 co-defendants with attempting to steal victory in the 2020 battleground. Meadows wants to move his case to federal court, where he may have a better chance of having it dismissed.
Meadows is not the first White House chief of staff to be charged with a crime. Richard Nixon henchman H.R. Haldeman went to jail for conspiracy, obstruction and perjury. But Trump’s Oval Office gatekeeper’s ordeal occurred in the first major courtroom battle following Trump’s four indictments. Monday offered the first chance for prosecutors in any of the cases against Trump to preview evidence in court that could potentially convict him. At any time, the spectacle of a White House chief of staff being cross-examined, albeit in an evidential hearing, would have helped define a political era. In the exhausting, logic-defying Trump epoch, it may not even have been the day’s most significant event.
The…
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