'I was wrong': Legal expert walks back suggestion Trump would skirt consequences

A legal expert who said that Donald Trump is unlikely to face consequences in the federal Jan. 6 election conspiracy case on Tuesday walked back his comments.

Lawyer and political commentator Elie Mystal in his first social media post said that he didn’t think Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is overseeing the case, would be able to bring Trump to trial before the Republican National Convention, scheduled to be held in Milwaukee July 15-18 of next year, “at which point he'll be named as their nominee and trying him becomes nearly impossible before the election. BUT, Chutkan is doing the thing I thought no judge would: treating Trump as a normal citizen.”

Mystal said he had a change of heart after reviewing court documents from Monday’s hearing in which Chutkan set March 4, 2024, as the start date for the case.

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“I've read through Judge Chutkan's transcript from yesterday and... I am starting to worry that I am going to need to file an official notice of 'I was wrong' with the relevant authorities. I'm very close to being paraded through the streets while @MuellerSheWrote chants ‘shame,’” Mystal said.

Conservative lawyer and anti-Trump activist George Conway in a reply to Mystal’s post suggested that Chutkan was unlikely to be moved by political considerations, including whether the former president had already secured the nomination, setting the stage for the unthinkable.

“Don’t be too hard on yourself. It may well be—in fact there’s a reasonable and increasing probability—that #P01135809 will be tried and convicted, and immediately remanded, as he should be, yet already have sewn up the nomination,” Conway wrote.

“In other words, P01135809 could easily become the first major-party presidential nominee to gain his party’s nomination and to run a general-election campaign—while incarcerated.”