After the Supreme Court’s atrocious immunity ruling in Turmp v. United States, which had the effect of pushing back until after the 2024 election Trump’s trial on very serious election interference charges related to to the 2020 election, some had suggested there would at least be time for the trial court to conduct a “mini-trial” before the election into the interference charges and how they interacted with claims of immunity. The idea would have been to get people like Mike Pence to testify as to what Trump did (and maybe even Trump himself on the stand) to air such issues before the election.

Now the special counsel has thrown in the towel and there will be no mini-trial before the election. And I don’t think it matters much either.

The real point of the mini-trial would have been to put Trump’s attempted election subversion front and center in the weeks before the election in the midst of the general election campaign as people were still voting. It was a fantasy that the special counsel would try to do it, and if he did that the courts would have allowed it. The Supreme Court surely would have put it on hold until after the election if Trump asked.

And what would it have accomplished? We already have judicial determinations that Trump engaged in election interference. This would be another one that would be tentative and couched in terms of the immunity ruling. We also have the very thorough January 6 Committee Report from the House, and lots of investigative reporting. People know what Trump did and will make decisions based on that evidence.

What the voters deserved was a determination by a jury that Trump engaged in a crime or did not in relation to the 2020 election. Once the Supreme Court slow walked the appeal on the immunity ruling, it was game over. Raising people’s hopes was no better than folks putting stock in Robert Muller’s investigations for years.