Special counsel prosecutors sharply objected on Monday to Donald Trump’s request for an April 2026 trial date in the case involving his efforts to subvert the 2020 election results, arguing his lawyers’ reasons were disingenuous and denied the American public’s right to a speedy trial.
The six-page court filing took particular issue with how the former US president’s legal team used flawed statistics to apparently settle on having a trial take place three years after he was charged with four felony counts in August for conspiring to return himself to office.
Trump has made clear that his overarching legal strategy for each of his criminal cases is to seek delay – preferably until after the 2024 presidential election, in which he is the frontrunner to clinch the Republican nomination – in an effort to insulate himself from the charges.
The consequences of an extended delay could be far-reaching. If the case is not adjudicated until after the 2024 election and Trump is re-elected, he could try to pardon himself or direct the attorney general to have the justice department drop the case.
When Trump’s lawyers last week asked the presiding US district court judge, Tanya Chutkan, for a trial in 2026, they cited the “median time” of 29.2 months that it took to convict defendants in cases that involved the charge of conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, which Trump also faces.
But prosecutors in the office of special counsel Jack Smith argued that using the median time as a benchmark was misleading because it includes the time it takes for jury selection, trial, verdict and several months of sentencing deliberation, rather than just the duration of pre-trial proceedings.
“The question here is when it is appropriate to start trial in this case, and statistics regarding the length of time from indictment to sentencing in other Section 371 cases have no bearing on that decision,” prosecutors wrote.
The court filing added that the median time statistic from Trump’s lawyers omitted the fact that the timeframe they used to generate the number, from October 2021 to September 2022, covered the period when the federal courts were dealing with a backlog stemming from Covid-19 closures.
“During that period, only 22 cases went to trial nationwide. This small and skewed sample provides no help to the Court in deciding an appropriate trial date,” prosecutors wrote, adding that all of those cases also involved multiple co-defendants – which is not the case for Trump.
The prosecutors also argued that Trump’s lawyers were being disingenuous about the volume of evidence that the government intended to turn over in discovery so that they could construct their defense arguments.
The Trump legal team had argued that the more than 11m pages of discovery meant it would take an especially long time for them to comb through the material given they only had four lawyers, compared with the dozens of prosecutors detailed to the special counsel’s office.
The prosecutors argued that Trump’s lawyers were not obliged to look at each page and could use filters, “all of which services, and more, are offered by the defendant’s e-discovery vendor, according to its own website, and are tools that courts appropriately expect legal professionals to use”.
The prosecutors added that the judge should not be swayed by the graphic that the Trump legal team included in their filing that showed printing and stacking the millions of pages of discovery would result in a tower taller than the Washington monument.
“In cases such as this one, the burden of reviewing discovery cannot be measured by page count alone, and comparisons to the height of the Washington Monument and the length of a Tolstoy novel are neither helpful nor insightful; in fact, comparisons such as those are a distraction,” they wrote.
