Donald Trump will spend ‘Super Tuesday’ – on March 4, 2024 -, the key electoral day of the United States primaries, in court, accused of trying to steal the 2020 elections. This has been ruled by the judge instructing the case, Tanya Chutkan, at a hearing in the US capital today.
The date constitutes a victory for the Prosecutor’s Office, which was represented at the hearing by Molly Gaston, and a considerable failure for Donald Trump’s team, which had demanded that the trial be held in no less than April 2026, that is, almost three years after the charge. Initially, the prosecution, led by special counsel Jack Smith, had requested January 2. Chutkan has considered that date too early, but has only pushed it back two months, no more than two years, which is what Trump wanted.
The objective of the former president was to move the trial away from the elections as much as possible and, also, to open the possibility of forgiving himself in the event that he won the 2024 elections. The judge’s decision is, therefore, exactly the opposite of Trump’s goal, though the impact a trial will have on the primary is unclear, given the former president’s tremendous popularity among Republican bases.
By choosing March 4, Chutkan deals another, more subtle, blow to Trump. That date was the one requested by the Georgia prosecutor, Fani Willis, for the trial to be held in that jurisdiction against Trump and 18 other accused also for the theft of the elections. Last week, several of the defendants requested a date change, and Willlis decided to request October 24. That’s a lousy option for Trump and his team, because it only gives them two months to prepare for a case that looks too difficult for them. Now, by choosing March 4 for the Washington trial, Chutkan has made it impossible for Georgia to use that date, which seems to indicate that whatever it is, the process in that state will also be earlier, possibly this same anus.
In Georgia, not only is the date of the trial up in the air, but the authority of Fulton County itself, in which the city of Atlanta is, to celebrate it. Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, who is one of the defendants, appeared before the judge yesterday to request that the trial be transferred from Fulton County to the federal state. Meadows’ argument is that he committed the crimes of which he is accused while he was in federal office–chief of staff to the president–so he should be tried by the federal state, and not by a county. His real motivation is that in federal justice he will find a more favorable jury than in Fulton County, a largely Democratic area.
But it is not clear that he will succeed, since, in the indictment, Willis claims that Trump continued to try to get Georgia to commit voter fraud and declare him the winner of the election until September 2021, that is, when Joe Biden He had already been president for no less than nine months. That means the “criminal gang” continued long after Trump and his associates took federal office.
The former president’s legal team is considering following that strategy, although it also has some reluctance, since, to request the transfer, the defendant must testify before the judge, which Meadows had to do yesterday. The ex-president’s strategy is not to cooperate at all with the proceedings of the case, again to postpone the trial as long as possible, so testifying can be counterproductive. There is also one last risk factor: when declaring a defendant may fall into contradictions or give information that can be used by the Prosecutor’s Office in the trial.
