Merrick Garland may be to blame if Trump beats docs case: legal expert

If Donald Trump beats federal charges over the handling of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, special counsel Jack Smith may have his boss to blame.

That’s according to former federal prosecutor Shan Wu, who writes for The Daily Beast that Attorney General Merrick Garland’s cautious approach to prosecuting the former president put Smith at a disadvantage that Trump’s lawyers are now trying to exploit.

Wu argues that delays in a criminal trial are essentially a defense attorney’s best friend, and that a court filing late Monday night asking the judge presiding over the case to delay the case against Trump and co-defendant Walt Nauta indicates the former president’s lawyers' awareness of this essential element of criminal law.

Wu writes that “As most of us know when we are late, every little delay from lost keys to red lights adds up. For criminal defense lawyers, delay is nearly always their friend. Memories fade with time, evidence grows stale and — in Trump’s case — elections happen.”

Wu acknowledges that it would be challenging to bring the inherently complicated classified documents case to trial by the end of this year under the best of circumstances, and that judges often grant delays for good reason, noting that pressuring a defendant to go to trial too soon can create potential appellate issues.

Wu contends that, “The Trump and Nauta defense lawyers don’t need any brilliant or innovative legal strategies to slow down and delay the documents case trial. Standard tactics of delay will work just fine to postpone the case into the presidential election red zone. The only counter to this expected tactic would have been for Merrick Garland's DOJ to have gotten off to a much earlier start.”

Wu isn’t alone in suggesting Garland should have acted sooner.

Justice correspondent Elie Mystal earlier this year in a column for The Nation suggested Garland was “slow-walking” the process.

“By not taking the shot against Trump as early as possible, Garland has all but doomed his investigation to run out of time,” Mystal writes.

“Now, even if Trump is brought to trial, the outcome will not be determined by a judge and jury but by the results of Super Tuesday. Don’t believe me? Good luck trying to get the Republican Party’s leading vote getter into a jail cell next year because 4D chess player Garland put on a really good case. Trump is now more worried about Ron DeSantis than about the Department of Justice.”

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