With all the Republican handwringing about Trump’s multiple indictments and efforts to interfere with the administration of justice (including defunding the Special Counsel’s office – to be covered in separate post), it may be useful to consider what the “presumption of innocence” means.

Some people appear to believe that the presumption of innocence has some meaning outside the courtroom and that a person cannot be “guilty” when “presumed innocent. That belief is wrong. The presumption is a legal process concept not found as such in the Constitution but implied by the right to a fair trial. The Sixth Amendment provides:

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense.

The practical result of those words is that the accused cannot be convicted, i.e., formally found “guilty” of the alleged crimes without a trial and process that complies with the Sixth Amendment and other applicable sections of the Constitution and laws. But that does not mean that the accused is “innocent.” It means that in court, the accused enjoys the protections associated with “fair trial” at the end of which a decision of “guilt” or “innocence” will be made. It means he hasn’t been found guilty yet. This may seem like a “dancing on the head of a pin” issue, but Trump’s acolytes make much of it and the media constantly repeat it.

Being “presumed innocent” doesn’t mean you are innocent. It means you haven’t yet been found guilty by the proper process. If you are not guilty, you cannot be kept in jail pending trial unless some limited conditions are met and appropriate, evidence-based findings are made. These include being a flight risk. Or a threat to witnesses.

So, Donald Trump may be “presumed innocent” but he is not “innocent.” No one, even his most ardent sycophantic idolizers, has argued that the facts alleged in the four criminal indictments against him are untrue. Nor could they make credible arguments to that effect. Instead, they deflect and distract with unproven and unprovable claims that the various governments that charged Trump have been “weaponized” for purposes of political revenge, or to keep Trump out of the 2024 race, or Trump shouldn’t be held accountable because others for whom no meaningful evidence of criminal conduct was ever brought forward have not been charged with crimes. Or or or or something anything, look a flying squirrel, look a UFO!

Trump’s only defense is delay. On the merits, on the facts, he is dead in the water. And yes, yes, he has the legal right to ask the state courts to remove the cases to federal court [all should be denied] and the legal right to ask that trial dates be put off to 2050 [denied].

Yes, Trump has us right where we want him. American justice is painfully slow, but Trump’s standard playbook is toast. The only real question is how long this is going to take.

One other thing. Various of Trump’s political allies are trying to have Jack Smith’s Special Counsel office defunded as a means of stopping the prosecution. In Georgia, efforts are under way to impeach or otherwise halt the prosecution by Fanni Willis. I believe all of these efforts constitute obstruction of justice, and it is past time for the governments involved to say so. Republicans in Congress have no business interfering with a criminal prosecution any more than they could pass a law saying that prior conduct of a particular individual, criminal at the time, was retroactively no longer criminal. The Republican Party has lost its claim to being the party of “law and order.”