A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Josh and Kate discuss the potential, looming Donald Trump indictment in Jack Smith’s January 6 case and House Republicans’ torpedoing of the government funding process.

You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.

As you can see, Trump Judge (in every sense) Aileen Cannon has scheduled ex-President Trump’s documents case trial for May 2024. This wasn’t as soon as prosecutors wanted. But Cannon rejected Trump’s request for an indefinite delay until after the 2024 election. I wanted to share some thoughts on what this all means for the rule of law generally as well as for the 2024 election.

I was corresponding this morning with a former federal prosecutor who sees this decision as a significant win for Trump on this reasoning: We assume that in the coming days or weeks federal prosecutors will indict Trump for felonies tied to January 6th. Now we have two federal trials in addition to the state trial in New York and a likely one in Georgia. By scheduling the trial in May, Cannon has left very little time to schedule a January 6th trial prior to the May/documents trial. A federal judge in D.C. would be quite unlikely to schedule the two federal trials at the same time. That leaves it highly likely that the January 6th trial gets scheduled after the May 2024 documents trial.