Trump’s lawyers propose 2026 trial date in federal election case
Lawyers for former President Donald J. Trump asked a judge on Thursday to reject the government’s proposal to take Trump to trial in early January on charges of seeking to overturn the 2020 election and to instead push back the proceeding until April 2026 – nearly a year and a half after the 2024 election, nytimes.com reported.
The lawyers said the extraordinary delay was needed because of the historic nature of the case and the extraordinary volume of discovery evidence they will have to sort through — as much as 8.5 terabytes of materials, totaling over 11.5 million pages, they wrote in a filing to Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, who is overseeing the case, nytimes.com reported. In a bit of legal showmanship, Gregory M. Singer, the lawyer who wrote the brief, included a graph that showed how 11.5 million pages of documents stacked atop one another would result in a “tower of paper stretching nearly 5,000 feet into the sky.”
“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,” Singer wrote.
Trump’s aggressive request to postpone the trial in Federal District Court in Washington – a strategy he has pursued in all of the criminal cases he is facing – followed an equally ambitious proposal made last week by prosecutors in the office of the special counsel, Jack Smith, to get the case in front of a jury by the first week of 2024.
That requested date would place the trial after the November 2024 US election, in which Trump is the front-runner for the Republican nomination.
“The public interest lies in justice and fair trial, not a rush to judgment,” Trump’s attorneys wrote on Thursday.