WASHINGTON (CN) — Donald Trump’s legal team proposed a start date for a trial in the 2020 election subversion case against the former president Thursday evening that would begin well into the next presidential term: April 2026.
The proposal is far afield of special counsel Jack Smith’s request for a Jan. 2, 2024 trial and echoes a similar spat in Smith’s other case against Trump regarding his alleged mishandling of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate, where the presidential candidate requested a date after the November 2024 election.
“This more reasonable schedule — equal to the government’s time spent investigating — will allow this case to proceed in an orderly fashion, with both parties having a fair opportunity to review all material information, advance appropriate motions, and appraise the court of relevant legal issues,” John Lauro, Trump’s defense lawyer, wrote in the filing.
Lauro added that the proposed schedule would avoid any scheduling conflicts with other pending matters — Trump faces three other criminal cases in Georgia, Florida and New York, along with three civil cases also in New York — give them time to address the production of classified documents and allow Trump to seek evidence from third parties.
During the first hearing in the Jan. 6 case last Friday, Thomas Windom, a member of the special counsel team, revealed that there were approximately 11.6 million documents the government would be turning over to the defense that day.
The government will provide more as they begin marking documents as sensitive and non-sensitive, as per U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan’s order following the hearing.
Lauro pointed to that initial batch of documents as evidence the defense needs more time, saying that if they were able to start reviewing the documents today, it would require them to read 99,762 pages per day — or “the entirety of Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace,’ cover to cover, 78 times a day, every day” — in order to be prepared for jury selection according to Smith’s schedule.
To further emphasize his point, he said that if the 11.6 million documents were printed and stacked, it would reach nearly 5,000 feet into the sky.
“That is taller than the Washington Monument, stacked on top of itself eight times, with nearly a million pages to spare,” Lauro wrote, including a graph illustrating the stack of documents towering over both the monument and the Statue of Liberty.
Chutkan, a Barack Obama appointee, will likely address the parties’ dueling proposals during a hearing scheduled for Aug. 28.
She has not yet indicated how she will rule on the matter but did caution Lauro that if his client continued to make inflammatory statements — like his tirade this weekend on Truth Social where he called Chutkan “VERY BIASED & UNFAIR” — the “greater the need to move quickly to trial.”
U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee, faced a similar dilemma in scheduling a trial for the classified documents case, where Smith suggested a start date in December 2023, while Trump pushed for a post-election start. She ruled right down the middle, setting the trial for May 2024.
In addition to concerns over the large amount of evidence the defense must review, Lauro argued that the sheer complexity of the case makes a prolonged schedule more reasonable, calling it “terra incognita,” Latin for unexplored territory.
“No president has ever been charged with a crime for conduct committed while in office,” Lauro said. “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. These and numerous other issues will be questions of first impression, requiring significant time for the parties to consider … and for the court to resolve.”
If Trump is successful, both in pushing the Jan. 6 trial beyond the presidential election and in his campaign to return to the White House, he may be able to dismiss both the Jan. 6 case and the classified documents case either by ordering his new Attorney General to drop charges or potentially pardon himself.
However, that strategy would only work in the two federal cases; Trump would not have the power as president to throw out the state charges in New York and Georgia.
On Wednesday, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis requested a March 4, 2024, trial date for the former president to face charges over his alleged election interference, which resulted in 41 criminal counts for him, his former personal attorney and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and former Georgia Republican Party Chairman David Shafer.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg also requested a March 25, 2024, trial date for falsifying business records regarding hush money payments made to adult film star Stormy Daniels during his 2016 campaign.
Trump has denied wrongdoing in each of the cases he is now embroiled in.
Follow @Ryan_Knappy
Subscribe to Closing Arguments
Sign up for new weekly newsletter Closing Arguments to get the latest about ongoing trials, major litigation and hot cases and rulings in courthouses around the U.S. and the world.
