Lawyers for former President Donald J. Trump requested a choose on Thursday to reject the federal government’s proposal to take Mr. Trump to trial in early January on expenses of looking for to overturn the 2020 election and to as an alternative push again the continuing till April 2026 — almost a 12 months and a half after the 2024 election.
The legal professionals mentioned the extraordinary delay was wanted due to the historic nature of the case and the extraordinary quantity of discovery proof they should kind via — as a lot as 8.5 terabytes of supplies, totaling over 11.5 million pages, they wrote in a submitting to Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, who’s overseeing the case.
In a little bit of authorized showmanship, Gregory M. Singer, the lawyer who wrote the transient, included a graph that confirmed how 11.5 million pages of paperwork stacked atop each other would lead to a “tower of paper stretching nearly 5,000 feet into the sky.”
That, Mr. Singer identified, was “taller than the Washington Monument, stacked on top of itself eight times, with nearly a million pages to spare.”
“Even assuming we could begin reviewing the documents today, we would need to proceed at a pace of 99,762 pages per day to finish the government’s initial production by its proposed date for jury selection,” Mr. Singer wrote. “That is the entirety of Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace,’ cover to cover, 78 times a day, every day, from now until jury selection.”
Mr. Trump’s aggressive request to postpone the trial in Federal District Court in Washington adopted an equally formidable proposal made final week by prosecutors within the workplace of the particular counsel, Jack Smith, to get the case in entrance of a jury by the primary week of 2024.
Now that Mr. Trump has been indicted 4 instances in 4 separate instances — most not too long ago, on Monday in Fulton County, Ga. — prosecutors have began jockeying with each other to find out when the trials might be held. Complicating issues, Mr. Trump’s marketing campaign schedule is about to choose up considerably this winter and spring with a collection of main elections simply as he might be obliged to be in numerous courthouses in numerous cities as a felony defendant.
The choose within the different federal case that Mr. Trump is going through — one by which he stands accused of illegally holding on to dozens of categorized paperwork after he left workplace — has slated the matter to go to trial on May 20 in Federal District Court in Fort Pierce, Fla.
On Wednesday, Fani T. Willis, the Fulton County district legal professional, proposed beginning the sprawling trial of Mr. Trump and 18 others on expenses of tampering with Georgia’s state election on March 4.
And that was solely three weeks earlier than the March 25 begin date for Mr. Trump’s fourth trial — one that can happen in Manhattan on expenses associated to hush cash funds made to a porn star within the weeks earlier than the 2016 election.
If the prosecutors all get their approach — and there’s no assurance they’ll — Mr. Trump could possibly be on trial roughly nonstop, with just a few weeks’ hiatus right here and there, from early January via maybe mid-June at a time when his marketing campaign advisers will certainly need him out on the path holding rallies and assembly with voters.
Some of the previous president’s advisers have made no secret of the truth that he’s trying to win the subsequent election as a method to attempt to clear up his authorized issues. If Mr. Trump, who’s now the presumptive Republican nominee, can push the federal trials till after the election and prevail, he might search to pardon himself after taking workplace or have his legal professional common merely dismiss the matter altogether.
To that finish, his legal professionals have sought numerous methods to sluggish prosecutors of their race to get to trial and have tried to delay the proceedings the place they’ll.
Last month, for instance, they requested the choose within the paperwork case, Aileen M. Cannon, to postpone that trial indefinitely, arguing that it mustn’t start till all “substantive motions” within the case had been introduced and determined. At a subsequent listening to, they advised Judge Cannon that she ought to push again the trial till after the 2024 election as a result of, amongst different causes, Mr. Trump might by no means get a good jury within the maelstrom of news media consideration surrounding the race.
The legal professionals tried that gambit once more on Thursday with Judge Chutkan.
Mr. Singer famous in his submitting that the invention supplies weren’t solely expansive, however that the case additionally concerned a number of novel elements that made it, as he put it, “terra incognita.”
“No person in the history of our country has ever been charged with conspiracies related to the Electoral Count Act,” he wrote, referring to the post-Civil War period legislation that governs the counting of electors to the Electoral College.
“No president has ever been charged with a crime for conduct committed while in office,” he continued. “No major party presidential candidate has ever been charged while in the middle of a campaign — and certainly not by a Justice Department serving his opponent.”
Mr. Singer additionally talked about Mr. Trump’s more and more crowded authorized calendar, noting that the federal government’s proposal to go to trial in January “presents numerous conflicts” with what he genially described as “other pending matters.”
Source: www.nytimes.com