Special counsel Jack Smith has gotten used to moving quickly. It was just under nine months after he was appointed as a special counsel in November that he indicted former President Donald Trump for trying to overturn the 2020 election. Now he’d like to keep the momentum going and has proposed that a trial begin Jan. 2, a little over four months from now.
On Thursday, Trump’s lawyers proposed that the trial begin in April. April 2026, that is. That’s right, Trump is seeking to delay Smith’s proposed start of the trial by more than two years. It’s the most audacious bid to delay legal proceedings that we’ve ever seen from Trump — and that’s really saying something, given that, for decades, his primary legal strategy has been to stall. It’s one thing to say on television that the defense should get an equal amount of time to prepare as the prosecution has spent investigating, but to see such nonsense in a legal filing is truly shocking. As a whole, the filing shows how deeply unserious Trump’s team is and the lack of substantive arguments it has.
That’s right, Trump is seeking to delay Smith’s proposed start of the trial by more than two years.
“The government’s objective is clear: to deny President Trump and his counsel a fair ability to prepare for trial,” Trump lawyer Todd Blanche writes in the filing submitted to U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan. The reasons he lists can be boiled down to a few key points: The government had more time to prepare and more lawyers working the case; the case is massive, with millions of pages of documents; it’s a case with no historic precedence; and Trump has a lot of other trials to get through.
The most potentially salient argument Blanche presents is the amount of material Trump’s team will have to review. Smith’s office has already provided roughly 11.5 million pages worth of documents to Trump, and there’s audio-visual material on top of that.
But Trump’s team couldn’t even make that point without sounding ridiculously dramatic. The filing claims that “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. That is the entirety of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, cover to cover, 78 times a day, every day, from now until jury selection.”
Somebody on Trump’s team decided to helpfully include a citation: “LEO TOLSTOY, WAR AND PEACE (Vintage Classics Ed., Dec. 2008).” Honestly, though, that citation happens to be more relevant than other citations we’ve previously seen from Trump attorneys. Blanche is right that it would take a very long time to get through all of this material — but asking for a trial that far in the future is still preposterous.
From there, the arguments get much less convincing. The idea that Smith’s office is too well staffed and funded to make for a fair trial may be popular among congressional Republicans, but it will probably carry little weight here. For one, how many cases are there in which the defendant is better resourced than the government? If that were a valid reason to delay a trial, almost every trial would be delayed.
Also, this is one of the rare cases in which the defendant is a literal billionaire; that is, he has more resources than many defendants could ever dream of having. Theoretically, Trump could easily afford to pay a whole phalanx of lawyers to work this case for him, even if he weren’t busy draining his political committees dry to avoid having to dip into his own pockets. But it’s not Smith’s fault that Trump’s history of either not paying his lawyers or refusing to take their advice has left him scraping the bottom of the barrel for representation.
Meanwhile, the filing tries to turn the number of pending cases against Trump into an advantage. Because as things stand, Trump is juggling four criminal cases, two at the federal level and one each in New York and Georgia, as well as a second defamation suit from writer E. Jean Carroll in federal court in New York and a major civil case against his business in New York. The election interference case would go first among the criminal cases under Smith’s proposed trial schedule, so of course that means the trial should be pushed back until after all of the others, Blanche argues.
But even U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, who has been more receptive to Trump’s lawyers’ reasoning than some judges might be, rejected a proposal to move the federal Mar-a-Lago documents case to after the 2024 election. Cannon instead ordered in July that the trial will take place in May. It seems unlikely that Chutkan will be more inclined to grant an even lengthier delay.
The novelty of Trump’s actions and his status as a candidate are all the more reason to move forward with this case quickly.
It’s true that, as Blanche wrote, “no president has ever been charged with a crime for conduct committed while in office” and that “no major party presidential candidate has ever been charged while in the middle of a campaign.” It may even be the case, as he argues, that “these and numerous other issues will be questions of first impression, requiring significant time for the parties to consider and brief, and for the Court to resolve.”
But the novelty of Trump’s actions and his status as a candidate are all the more reason to move forward with this case quickly. Even if Blanche doesn’t seriously expect to have the trial pushed back two years, it is such an extreme opening bid that the goal may be to make even a midway point between the two dates seem reasonable, as with the Mar-a-Lago case. That would, of course, still push the trial start date into the next presidential term, leaving the door open for a victorious Trump to have whichever attorney general he appoints dismiss the case altogether or to pardon himself.
Chutkan must be aware of this reasoning from Trump’s legal team and that he’s running to reclaim an office prosecutors say he attempted to hold in contravention of multiple U.S. laws. Giving him the opportunity to do so again can’t feasibly be considered to be in the national interest.
My prediction is that this trial may pushed back to July, at the latest, after the Mar-a-Lago case has concluded. That would still be ahead of the Republican National Convention, months before Election Day and lots more time than Trump’s team needs to prepare what is looking like a very thin defense.
