Donald Trump is trying to push back Jack Smith’s proposed election interference trial date of Jan. 2024 to 2026, after the presidential election.
Special counsel Jack Smith has gotten used to moving quickly. It was just under nine months after he was appointed as a special counsel in November that he indicted former President Donald Trump for trying to overturn the 2020 election. Now he’d like to keep the momentum going and has proposed that a trial begin Jan. 2, a little over four months from now.
On Thursday, Trump’s lawyers proposed that the trial begin in April. April 2026, that is. That’s right, Trump is seeking to delay Smith’s proposed start of the trial by more than two years. It’s the most audacious bid to delay legal proceedings that we’ve ever seen from Trump — and that’s really saying something, given that, for decades, his primary legal strategy has been to stall. It’s one thing to say on television that the defense should get an equal amount of time to prepare as the prosecution has spent investigating, but to see such nonsense in a legal filing is truly shocking. As a whole, the filing shows how deeply unserious Trump’s team is and the lack of substantive arguments it has.
“The government’s objective is clear: to deny President Trump and his counsel a fair ability to prepare for trial,” Trump lawyer Todd Blanche writes in the filing submitted to U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan. The reasons he lists can be boiled down to a few key points: The government had more time to prepare and more lawyers working the case; the case is massive, with millions of pages of documents; it’s a case with no historic precedence; and Trump has a lot of other trials to get through.
The most potentially salient argument Blanche presents is the amount of material Trump’s team will have to review. Smith’s office has already provided roughly 11.5 million pages worth of documents to Trump, and there’s audio-visual material on top of that.
But Trump’s team couldn’t even make that point without sounding ridiculously dramatic. The filing claims that “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.
