The Cases Against Trump: A Guide
Sign up for The Decision, a newsletter featuring our 2024 election coverage.
Donald Trump’s luck in the courts has turned.
Trump became the first former president to be convicted of a felony when a jury in Manhattan found him guilty of 34 counts in May. That followed decisive and costly losses in civil cases: Trump was fined more than half a billion dollars when courts found that he had defamed the writer E. Jean Carroll and committed financial fraud in his business.
Since then, Trump has won a string of victories, and the three remaining criminal cases against him seem deeply bogged down. A Supreme Court decision on July 1 threw into limbo the federal case against him for attempting to subvert the 2020 election. The justices ruled that a president is immune from prosecution for any “official” actions, and found that some of the allegations concerned official actions.
Two weeks later, Trump won another big long-shot victory when Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee, dismissed charges against him for hoarding classified documents in his residence at Mar-a-Lago. She concluded that the appointment of Special Counsel Jack Smith, who brought the case for the Justice Department, was not constitutional. The decision has been appealed.
