More than 18 months ago, as Donald Trump sought to delay several high-profile witness’ testimony to a grand jury investigating his effort to subvert the 2020 election, Washington’s top federal district judge sensed a potential calamity.
“The special counsel’s investigation is moving quickly. There is an imperative that it moves quickly particularly so as not to interfere with the 2024 election cycle,” Chief Judge James Boasberg said on April 3, 2023, according to a newly unsealed transcript of the secret proceeding. “So when the former President’s pleading says that there will be a nominal impact from a delay, I think that is a vast understatement, that there would be a serious and deleterious impact from a delay.”
Boasberg’s warning in the early stages of special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation of the former president now rings prescient. A series of delays engineered by Trump, most notably an eight-month freeze while the Supreme Court considered his claim to be immune from the charges altogether, have caused the criminal proceedings to collide with the 2024 election cycle — and made it impossible for Trump to stand trial on the most serious charges he faces before Election Day.
As his cases have persisted into the general election season, Trump has accused the Biden administration of seeking to hobble him politically.
But a different story emerges in newly unsealed court documents, which became public Monday evening after a two-year legal effort initiated by POLITICO. The documents show that judges repeatedly warned Trump against unnecessarily delaying his federal election case, both because of the intense public interest in seeing the case resolved and also, in Boasberg’s telling, to avoid the pitfalls of the case dragging deep into 2024. Boasberg’s predecessor as chief judge, Beryl Howell, who oversaw early aspects of the Trump grand jury investigations, similarly decried Trump’s “delay tactics” and an “obvious pattern of delay.”
Ultimately, the judges ordered a parade of top White House officials to speak to the special counsel’s grand jury in secret — and they rejected Trump’s effort to slow-walk the process, sometimes giving Trump less than 48 hours to appeal their decisions. The evidence those witnesses provided formed the crux of the criminal case that Smith filed against Trump in August 2023.
U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who was chosen randomly to preside over the case after Smith charged Trump with a sweeping scheme to steal a second term, has similarly — and emphatically — rejected Trump’s efforts to base key scheduling decisions on the election calendar. Trump nevertheless succeeded in thwarting Chutkan’s planned trial date of March 4, 2024.
In 2022, POLITICO petitioned Howell to reveal aspects of secret decisions she made that forced top Trump White House officials — like two aides to former Vice President Mike Pence — to testify to the grand jury about conversations Trump had claimed were shielded by executive privilege. Though Howell initially rejected the request, citing the traditional secrecy of the grand jury process, an appeals court ordered Boasberg — who succeeded Howell as chief in March 2023 — to revisit the matter after Smith disclosed some details of the secret battles with Trump.
Though the newly public documents remain significantly redacted and don’t identify the witnesses Trump fought to keep silent, they align with contemporaneous news reports that revealed the identities of those who were ultimately compelled to testify.
What emerges is a clear portrayal of the former president trying frenetically to prevent former top aides from disclosing details of their conversations about Trump’s bid to reverse his defeat in the election. Trump claimed they were “absolutely” shielded from disclosure because some of those discussions involved matters of national security, and he said the conversations were also confidential because they involved his official duties to ensure the 2020 election was fair and secure.
The documents also show that in each instance, prosecutors approached the White House to ask whether President Joe Biden would exercise his own authority to assert executive privilege on Trump’s behalf. In each case, Biden declined, citing the “unique” considerations of the Trump case.
The rulings were not without some wins for Trump. For example, in rejecting one bid to block a witness from appearing, Howell agreed with Trump that his conversations with top aides about the 2020 election related to his official duties as president.
“The communications implicate the former president’s generalized interest in confidentiality because they speak to his effort to execute effectively the duties of his office — in this case the integrity of a national election and certification of such,” Howell wrote in a Sept. 28, 2022, opinion on Trump’s bid to block the two Pence aides, Marc Short and Greg Jacob, from testifying about certain conversations.
Howell nevertheless rejected Trump’s effort, agreeing that the importance of their testimony to the criminal investigation outweighed Trump’s interest in keeping the discussions confidential.
–
POLITICO
