Donald Trump has an appointment on March 4, 2024 with the federal court in Washington. The former American president will be tried for his attempts to reverse the results of the 2020 election, announced on Monday August 28, judge Tanya Chutkan, who will chair the proceedings.
The judge decided during a hearing between the proposal of special prosecutor Jack Smith, who wanted the trial of Donald Trump in Washington to begin on January 2, 2024, a deadline too short according to her, and the distant deadline of April 2026 requested by the defence, deeming it “far beyond what is necessary”.
This date is not hasty, added the magistrate, stressing that the trial would open exactly three years, two months and six days after January 6, 2021. She was referring to the assault on the Capitol, seat of Congress, by hundreds of supporters of Donald Trump white-hot to prevent the certification of the victory of his Democratic opponent Joe Biden.
This will therefore be the first criminal trial for the favorite of the Republican primaries, who must also be tried from the end of March 2024 in New York State for suspicious payments to a former porn actress, in May 2024 by a court in Florida (Southeast) for his negligent management of confidential documents after his departure from the White House.
The date of his trial in a fourth case, that of electoral pressure in Georgia in 2020, indictment which earned him his mugshot last week, an already historic cliché for a former president, has not yet been announced. been fixed.
Unsurprisingly, Judge Chutkan dismissed most of the arguments of the defense, which claimed two and a half years, the equivalent of the duration of the investigation, to examine the documents of the prosecution. Donald Trump’s attorney, John Lauro, vehemently railed against the prosecution’s proposed January 2024 date. “You’re asking for a show trial, not a quick trial,” he told the hearing. “You’re not going to be two years older, this case won’t go to trial in 2026,” she said Monday.
For the prosecution, prosecutor Molly Gaston invoked “the extraordinary public interest in a speedy trial”, given that “the defendant is charged with historic crimes” for a president in office at the time.
The judge had already warned Donald Trump against any “inflammatory statement likely to pollute the selection of the jury”, which could only encourage the magistrate to set an early date for the trial. That didn’t stop the Republican billionaire from accusing President Joe Biden of being responsible for his indictments on Monday without evidence, again calling the Democratic leader “a scoundrel”. The two men could once again be opposed during the presidential election of November 2024.
It was not immediately clear what consequences this new date could have on Donald Trump’s busy court schedule, although Judge Tanya Chutkan said she had informed her colleague in charge of the trial in New York of her decision. “I assume that the four judges in charge of these cases have tried to coordinate the order of the trials and that the prosecutors in New York and Georgia will postpone theirs in deference to the federal cases”, explained before the hearing Carl Tobias , professor of law at the University of Richmond.
For Whit Ayres, a Republican political consultant, an acquittal of Donald Trump at his first upcoming trial, whatever it is, would help make his lead in the Republican primaries irreversible. “I don’t see how it would be possible to stop him” in his nomination contest, he said in an online interview. “But if he’s convicted on a serious charge, I don’t know how people would react,” he continued, “because we’ve never had a situation remotely like this. »
In a post on his Truth Social network, the former president, a Republican primary candidate, accused the judge of “hating Trump” and announced that he would file an appeal.