Donald Trump’s defense proposed Thursday, August 17, that his trial in federal court in Washington for his alleged fraudulent attempts to reverse the 2020 election result be held in April 2026, well after the November 2024 presidential election A week ago, Special Prosecutor Jack Smith proposed that the former US president’s trial begin on January 2, 2024, saying it “should not last longer than four to six weeks.”
The judge who will preside over the proceedings, Tanya Chutkan, has set a hearing for August 28 to determine the date of the trial, and had asked the two parties for their proposals before deciding. “The public interest rests in a fair and just trial, not in the haste of judgment,” Donald Trump’s lawyers defended Thursday in their proposed schedule. According to them, the only examination of the documents constituting the file could take several years.
If the prosecution’s proposed schedule were chosen, “even assuming that we began reviewing these documents today, we would need to go at the rate of 99,762 pages per day […] to finish on time,” they assure. And to continue: “It’s the equivalent of reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace, cover to cover, 78 times a day, every day, from today to the jury selection”, at the beginning of the trial.
The date of April 2026, more than two and a half years from now, would allow them to prepare the fair defense of their client, and not to interfere with the other lawsuits against the ex-president, they plead. Donald Trump, campaigning for the Republican primary to win back the White House in 2024, is the subject of four criminal charges, two at the federal level, in Washington and Florida (Southeast), one in New York State and one in Georgia (Southeast).
The real estate mogul consistently blames his legal hassles on the administration of Democratic President Joe Biden, who he could find on his way in 2024 for a rematch of the 2020 election. Crying “election interference,” he insists on his desire for these trials to be held after the ballot. “None of these trials should be allowed to begin before the election” scheduled for November 2024, he said again Thursday on his Truth Social platform.
The next January 2 date “represents an appropriate balance between the defendant’s right to prepare his defense and the strong public interest in a speedy trial” in such an emblematic case, in which a former president is accused of undermining the foundations of the federal institutions, argued Jack Smith in his argument.
Trial dates have already been set for New York and Florida: March and May 2024 respectively. The Republican billionaire announced on his platform, Truth Social, that he would cancel a press conference scheduled for Monday at his New Jersey golf course. , in which he was supposed to provide evidence of presidential vote fraud in that state. His lawyers preferred to “open legal proceedings”, he said.
