Donald Trump’s defense on Thursday proposed that the trial of the former US president for attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election would begin in April 2026.
The presiding judge, Tanya Chutkan, has scheduled a hearing for August 28 to set a trial date, and has asked the two sides for proposals before deciding.
Last week, the special attorney in charge of the case, Jack Smith, had proposed that Donald Trump’s trial in federal court in Washington would begin January 2, 2024, predicting that “it wouldn’t take more than four to six weeks.” .
This date “represents an appropriate balance between the defendant’s right to prepare his defense and the strong public interest in a speedy trial” in such an emblematic case, accusing a former president of weakening federal institutions, he argued. Smith.
“The public interest is in a fair and just trial, not a hasty trial,” Donald Trump’s lawyers defended Thursday.
The Republican defense claimed it could take several years to sift through the 11.5 million pages of documents that make up the trial.
If the deadline proposed by the prosecution were chosen, “even if we start examining these documents today, we would have to go through 99,762 pages a day (…) to finish in time,” the lawyers said.
The defense added that a trial in April 2026 would allow for fair preparation of the case and would not interfere with other proceedings against the former president, which already have sessions scheduled for March and May 2024.
Trump regards the court charges as attempted “election interference” by Democrats and has insisted that the trials be held after the November 2024 presidential election.
Despite the lawsuits piling up, the businessman remains the favorite for the Republican nomination.
This is the fourth criminal case against the former president and the second in which he is charged with undermining the election results, along with another alleging that he attempted to provoke fraud in the results of the 2020 presidential election in the state of Georgia.
On Thursday, Trump canceled a press conference scheduled for Monday in which he had promised to “present a vast, complex, detailed, but irrefutable report on the presidential election fraud that took place in Georgia.”
“My lawyers prefer to post this, in my opinion, irrefutable and overwhelming evidence of electoral fraud and irregularities as formal legal documents,” the tycoon said on his social network Truth Social.
Source: DN
