Trump Requests 2026 Trial Date for Federal Election Interference Case
Former President Donald Trump’s legal team has asked the judge overseeing his federal 2020 election interference case to schedule his trial for April 2026, more than two and a half years away.
In contrast, special counsel Jack Smith requested last week that D.C. district judge Tanya Chutkan schedule Trump’s trial for January, arguing that it would “vindicate the public’s strong interest” in a speedy trial.
“In this District, ordinary order when faced with such overwhelming discovery is to set a reasonable trial schedule, commensurate with the size and scope of discovery and complexity of the legal issues,” Trump’s attorneys argued in their filing Thursday.
“The government rejects this sensible approach. Instead, it seeks a trial calendar more rapid than most no-document misdemeanors, requesting just four months from the beginning of discovery to jury selection,” they said in the filing.
“The government’s objective is clear: to deny President Trump and his counsel a fair ability to prepare for trial.”
Chutkan will hear arguments from both sides at a status conference on August 28.
Trump’s Legal Maneuvers: Pleading Not Guilty, Document Volume, and Trial Scheduling
Trump earlier this month pleaded not guilty to federal charges of engaging in a “criminal scheme” to overturn the results of the 2020 election by enlisting a slate of so-called “fake electors,” using the Justice Department to conduct “sham election crime investigations, and attempting to enlist the vice president to “alter the election results.”
The former president has denied any wrongdoing and condemned the allegations as “the persecution of a political opponent.”
Trump’s filing on Thursday included a list of dates spanning nearly three years, which they noted is “equal to the government’s time spent investigating” the assault on the U.S. Capitol on January 6.
To illustrate the magnitude of the vast volume of discovery at issue in the case, they stated in the filing that after receiving the government’s first production of approximately 11.5 million pages of evidence, they attempted to download the files, but “two days later it was still downloading.”
They estimate that if they started reviewing the documents today, “we would need to review 99,762 pages per day to complete the government’s initial production by the proposed jury selection date.”
“That is the entirety of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, cover to cover, 78 times a day, every day, from now until jury selection,” Trump’s lawyers wrote.
They even provided a graph that they claimed illustrates the difference between a stack of 11.5 million pages of documents and the current volume of documents. Approximately ten times the height of the Statue of Liberty and the Washington Monument, the paper stack is roughly ten times the height of the structures.
Trump’s attorneys also cite Trump’s busy legal calendar in the coming months as a reason to delay scheduling his trial, including the special counsel’s classified documents case, the Fulton County DA’s election interference case in Georgia, and the Manhattan DA’s hush money case, as part of their request for a 2026 trial start date.
Trump has pleaded not guilty to all charges brought against him, and he has characterized the investigations as politically motivated.
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Source: abc NEWS
