Always important to remember how the American criminal justice system actually works. Depending on the jurisdiction somewhere between 90 to 97% of crimes are pleaded out. Law and Order-style trials are exceedingly rare. The exception, not the rule.
The entire system *can only function* with this being the case. As Michelle Alexander has pointed out, if every defendent got a trial the entire system would collapse under the weight. All parties to the system understand this.
Prosecutors use leverage, and the enticement of lighter sentences to induce please and defense lawyers and defendants make risk judgements. One binding constraint in all of this, of course, is that resources are limited. Everyone only has so many labor-hours to spend.
Which brings us to Big Show-Stopping Trials of Powerful people. These are a fraction of a fraction of what happens in the system, and in many ways the valence of advantage and resource constraints operate under an entirely different field of instutional gravity.
TL:DR; rolling up pleas all day on drug busts, or even getting homicide convictions at trial are very very different things than nailing the former President of the United States of America who will functionally have infinite resources at his disposal.
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