Trump in an unprecedented race between the legal system and the electoral clock

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Donald Trump’s trial over a hush-money payment to a porn star will begin on April 15, a judge ruled Monday, forging ahead with the first of the former president’s criminal proceedings.

On the same day, a different court reduced his bond in an unrelated civil fraud case from US$454-million to US$175-million and gave him an additional 10 days to pay. If he doesn’t, New York’s Attorney-General has warned, the state will move to seize his assets.

These mark the most substantive steps in Mr. Trump’s myriad legal travails since leaving office. But they may ultimately be the least important of his judicial troubles.

Over the last year, he has been indicted on 91 criminal charges across four different cases. They concern everything from efforts to overturn his 2020 re-election loss to classified documents stored in his bathroom. A trio of civil suits, meanwhile, has left him owing more than half a billion dollars in damages.

Looming over all of it is the spectre of November’s election. Constitutionally, there is nothing to stop Mr. Trump returning to the White House if he is convicted and imprisoned – or if the courts take his property – but he is pushing hard to delay legal proceedings until after the vote. If he wins his rematch against President Joe Biden, it is highly likely that Mr. Trump will try to stop at least some of the cases against him.

Meanwhile, he is spending much of his time, and tens of millions of dollars worth of his donors’ money, in the courtroom rather than the campaign trail. On Friday, he closed a deal to list his money-losing Truth Social platform on the stock market, in hopes of raising at least some of the funds he may need as the courtroom fights continue.

Mr. Trump is the only former U.S. president ever to be criminally charged. And in this unprecedented race between the legal system and the electoral clock, it is anyone’s guess who will win.

Here is where the cases stand.

The 2020 election: federal charges

The highest-profile of Mr. Trump’s cases may be the federal one accusing him of orchestrating a plot to reverse his defeat by Mr. Biden and triggering the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Special counsel Jack Smith has tried to keep the prosecution relatively straightforward. He has charged only Mr. Trump, despite detailing the actions of several alleged accomplices in his indictment. And he has laid just four charges, even as his accusations outline a sweeping conspiracy. Such attempts to streamline the case could be aimed at ensuring it advances swiftly.

Mr. Trump, however, has so far managed to delay the proceedings through a constitutional challenge. He is arguing that former presidents should be immune from prosecution for actions they took in office. Two courts have rejected the effort and it is now up to the Supreme Court to rule. The tribunal, which consists of six conservative and three liberal justices, has scheduled oral arguments for April 25. A decision could be issued as late as July, when the court recesses for the summer.

The original trial date was set for March 4 in Washington, but has been postponed indefinitely while the immunity challenge is decided.

If Mr. Trump defeats Mr. Biden in November, he has given every indication that he will use his powers to stop Mr. Smith. Mr. Trump’s campaign platform calls for exerting direct presidential power over government agencies and, in interviews, he has explicitly mused about giving direct orders to the Department of Justice.

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He could also try to issue a blanket presidential pardon to himself.

If any of this happens, it would no doubt cause Democratic anger at Attorney-General Merrick Garland, who waited nearly two years after the Capitol riot to appoint Mr. Smith.

The 2020 election: state charges

The case in Georgia is easily the most expansive. Fani Willis, district attorney in the county that includes Atlanta, indicted 19 people with a combined 41 charges over efforts to stop certification of Mr. Biden’s victory in the state and install a slate of fake electoral college members to support Mr. Trump instead. Under a racketeering statute, she accuses Mr. Trump and his alleged co-conspirators of effectively constituting a criminal organization.

Ms. Willis has seen some early success. Four of Mr. Trump’s co-accused have pleaded guilty and agreed to co-operate with her, including Sidney Powell, a lawyer central to Mr. Trump’s election-overturning attempt. But the sheer size of the indictment could push back any trial for Mr. Trump himself.

What’s more, Ms. Willis’s personal conduct nearly derailed the prosecution. After discovering that she’d had an extramarital affair with Nathan Wade, a special prosecutor managing the case, Mr. Trump and several co-defendants tried to get her thrown off. Judge Scott McAfee agreed that Ms. Willis and Mr. Wade had created an “appearance of impropriety” and effectively ordered him off the file. His ruling, however, allowed Ms. Willis to press forward with the prosecution.

Judge McAfee has also reduced the charge count against the former president to 10 from 13.

Unlike the federal charges, state-level cases would be harder for a re-elected Mr. Trump to interfere with. Presidential pardons, for instance, apply only federally.

Classified documents

One state to the south is Mr. Smith’s other federal indictment of Mr. Trump. Its 37 counts accuse the former president of taking 337 classified documents to Mar-a-Lago, his estate in Palm Beach, Fla., after leaving office and of trying to thwart federal government efforts to retrieve them. The documents included nuclear secrets and battle plans. Photographs showed them piled up in the shower of a Mar-a-Lago bathroom and on a stage in the mansion’s ballroom.

A central figure in the case is Aileen Cannon, the Trump-appointed judge handling it. During the initial investigation, she granted a motion by Mr. Trump that stopped the government from using documents seized from Mar-a-Lago during a search by the Federal Bureau of Investigation as evidence. The move was overturned by an appeals court.

More recently, she has proposed that when instructions are issued to the case’s eventual jurors, they be told that it is the sole right of a president to reclassify government records as personal documents. Such an order could effectively tell jurors to accept one of Mr. Trump’s key defences. She also has not yet set key dates for the case, making it unclear when it will move forward.

Mr. Smith could move to have the case reassigned to a different judge but has so far not indicated that he will do that.

Hush money

In a 34-count New York state indictment, Mr. Trump is charged with falsifying business records to hide a US$130,000 payment to pornographic-film actor Stormy Daniels. The money ensured Ms. Daniels, who says Mr. Trump once cheated on his wife with her, would stay silent ahead of the 2016 election.

The case is the most minor and, in some ways, the most legally convoluted of the prosecutions against Mr. Trump. But it will also be the first to go to trial.

Paying Ms. Daniels was not itself illegal, but district attorney Alvin Bragg contends doing so without disclosing it as a campaign expense violated elections rules and made efforts to cover up the payment felonious.

A trial had been scheduled to start on Monday, but Mr. Bragg agreed to a postponement after federal prosecutors belatedly turned over relevant documents.

Judge Juan Merchan set a new opening date of April 15, rejecting a bid by Mr. Trump’s lawyers to delay for another 90 days.

The civil cases

In addition to his pending criminal trials, Mr. Trump is also mired in civil proceedings.

First, he was found liable for sexually abusing and defaming the writer E. Jean Carroll, and ordered to pay her US$88.3-million between two different lawsuits. Then, the Trump Organization was hit with US$454-million in liabilities for defrauding banks and insurance companies by falsely inflating the value of its real estate assets.

Mr. Trump is appealing these judgments. In the cases related to Ms. Carroll, he posted bond. In the fraud case, however, his lawyers said Mr. Trump could not get financing for such a large bond, money he has to put up to cover the judgment against him in case he loses his appeal.

An appeals court on Monday granted him something of a reprieve, reducing the bond amount to US$175-million and giving him more time to come up with the money. If he still cannot scare up the cash and New York’s Democratic Attorney-General, Letitia James, makes good on her threat to seize Trump assets, there would be several steps before it actually happens.

The former president, meanwhile, is doing everything he can to further entwine his legal problems with his election bid.

One of his Super PACs, Make American Great Again Inc., has spent more than US$50-million covering his legal fees – funds that would otherwise go into helping him get elected.

In speeches and social media posts, he portrays all of the cases as examples of a shady political establishment out to get him.

In one typical fundraising e-mail sent this week, Mr. Trump asked for donors to send him money to “STOP THE WITCH HUNT.” It was headlined with a warning for New York judicial officials: “Keep your filthy hands off Trump Tower.”