District Attorney Fani Willis’s prediction that she does not expect her sprawling racketeering case against President Trump to conclude before the “winter or the very early part of 2025” raises the real possibility that a jury could bring in a guilty verdict on state crime charges against a sitting president. 

While that outcome is no certainty, it is distinctly in the realm of possibility. As a matter of political projection, Mr. Trump’s poll numbers appear to be gaining strength, with one well-respected survey putting him ahead of President Biden in five out of six key swing states. 

On the legal ledger, Ms. Willis now has four cooperating witnesses, three of them attorneys, who have promised under oath to testify “truthfully” about what they know regarding efforts to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia. Leaked footage suggests that the district attorney’s office is asking questions about Mr. Trump’s efforts to stay in power. 

Mr. Trump could also face a federal conviction in either or both of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s cases after he takes the oath of office for a second time, if he were to win the election. While a president has never pardoned himself, the Constitution ordains that he “shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States,” meaning for federal but not state crimes.

In addition to invoking his pardon power, which the Framers intentionally left unfettered, if Mr. Trump returns to the White House before a verdict is brought in on federal charges, he could aim to neutralize Mr. Smith, who, to a certain extent, is insulated from being fired at will.  

Current regulations stipulate that a special counsel may be removed from office for “misconduct, dereliction of duty, incapacity, conflict of interest, or for other good cause.” Any effort to remove Mr. Smith would likely trigger a Supreme Court showdown over the limits of presidential prerogative.

Mr. Trump would have fewer levers to pull if he is tried or convicted at a Fulton County courthouse while he is America’s commander in chief. Separated powers has been held to mean that the police power, or responsibility for criminal law, largely falls to the states. In a 1971 case, Younger v. Harris, the Supreme Court promulgated the idea of “Our Federalism,” limiting federal interference in state proceedings out of deference for the interests of the states.

That deference, though, cuts both ways. The Constitution’s Supremacy Clause ordains that itself, federal law, and treaties are the “supreme law of the land” and that “the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding.” 

Mr. Trump’s former chief of staff and a co-defendant in Georgia, Mark Meadows, has cited this clause in an effort to move Ms. Willis’s case against him to federal court or for it to be dismissed altogether. He argues that his duties as a federal employee put him within the ambit of its protection. That position failed at the district court and is now up for appellate review.  

Mr. Trump will likely be able to offer a stronger version of Mr. Meadows’s argument because the national parchment orders the president to ​​“take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” That special responsibility — as Justice Antonin Scalia put it, “all of the executive power” is vested in the chief executive — has been seen as providing presidential immunity from suits, at least of the civil variety. For this same reason, the Department of Justice has adopted a policy against charging a sitting president. 

As far back as 1807, Thomas Jefferson opposed issuing a subpoena to a sitting president. The author of the Declaration of Independence wrote that the “leading principle of our Constitution is the independence of the Legislature, executive and judiciary of each other.” While here the Founder worries about separated powers within the federal government, the same logic could inform a challenge to Ms. Willis’s prosecution.  

Jefferson, as these pages have recalled before, worried that the independence of the executive would be compromised if judges could “bandy” the president “from pillar to post, keep him constantly trudging from north to south & east to west, and withdraw him entirely from his constitutional duties?” 

How, though, would a president who was a guest of the Georgia Department of Corrections be able to fulfill those duties? Presumably, he would be afforded Secret Service protection even behind bars, and there is precedent, in the person of Eugene Debs, for a presidential candidate being incarcerated. A president serving from prison, though, would be unprecedented, though not constitutionally precluded. 

Ms. Willis has demonstrated a willingness to defend her turf. In response to a probe of her office launched by the House Judiciary Committee, the district attorney cited “serious constitutional concerns regarding federalism and separation of powers” for the position that there “is no justification in the Constitution for Congress to interfere with a state criminal matter.”