Legal professionals for former President Donald J. Trump requested a decide on Thursday to reject the federal government’s proposal to take Mr. Trump to trial in early January on prices of in search of to overturn the 2020 election and to as a substitute 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 must type by way of — as a lot as 8.5 terabytes of supplies, totaling over 11.5 million pages, they wrote in a submitting to Choose 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 almost 5,000 ft into the sky.”
That, Mr. Singer identified, was “taller than the Washington Monument, stacked on prime of itself eight occasions, with almost 1,000,000 pages to spare.”
“Even assuming we may start reviewing the paperwork at present, we would wish to proceed at a tempo of 99,762 pages per day to complete the federal government’s preliminary manufacturing by its proposed date for jury choice,” Mr. Singer wrote. “That’s the entirety of Tolstoy’s ‘Battle and Peace,’ cowl to cowl, 78 occasions a day, on daily basis, from now till jury choice.”
Mr. Trump’s aggressive request to postpone the trial in Federal District Courtroom in Washington adopted an equally bold 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 occasions in 4 separate instances — most just lately, on Monday in Fulton County, Ga. — prosecutors have began jockeying with each other to find out when the trials shall be held. Complicating issues, Mr. Trump’s marketing campaign schedule is about to choose up considerably this winter and spring with a collection of major elections simply as he shall be obliged to be in numerous courthouses in numerous cities as a legal defendant.
The decide within the different federal case that Mr. Trump is dealing with — one wherein he stands accused of illegally holding on to dozens of labeled paperwork after he left workplace — has slated the matter to go to trial on Might 20 in Federal District Courtroom in Fort Pierce, Fla.
On Wednesday, Fani T. Willis, the Fulton County district lawyer, proposed beginning the sprawling trial of Mr. Trump and 18 others on prices 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 may happen in Manhattan on prices associated to hush cash funds made to a porn star within the weeks earlier than the 2016 election.
If the prosecutors all get their manner — and there’s no assurance they’ll — Mr. Trump might be on trial roughly nonstop, with a number of weeks’ hiatus right here and there, from early January by way of 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.
A few of the former president’s advisers have made no secret of the truth that he’s seeking to win the following election as a method to attempt to remedy 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 may search to pardon himself after taking workplace or have his lawyer 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.
Final month, for instance, they requested the decide 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 offered and determined. At a subsequent listening to, they instructed Choose Cannon that she ought to push again the trial till after the 2024 election as a result of, amongst different causes, Mr. Trump may by no means get a good jury within the maelstrom of stories media consideration surrounding the race.
The legal professionals tried that gambit once more on Thursday with Choose 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 particular person within the historical past of our nation has ever been charged with conspiracies associated to the Electoral Depend Act,” he wrote, referring to the post-Civil Battle period regulation that governs the counting of electors to the Electoral School.
“No president has ever been charged with against the law for conduct dedicated whereas in workplace,” he continued. “No main celebration presidential candidate has ever been charged whereas in the midst of a marketing campaign — and definitely not by a Justice Division 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 quite a few conflicts” with what he genially described as “different pending issues.”
