The former president will be tried starting from March 4, 2024, in Washington for his attempts to overturn the outcome of the 2020 US presidential election. Donald Trump strongly denounced the set date for the beginning of his federal trial, calling this decision “electoral interference” in the 2024 presidential election.
His lawyers wanted a trial in 2026, the special prosecutor as early as January 2024: Donald Trump will finally be tried starting from March 4, 2024, by a federal court in Washington for his attempts to overturn the outcome of the 2020 election, announced Judge Tanya Chutkan, who will preside over the proceedings, on Monday, August 28.
This potentially represents the most serious of the trials awaiting the former US president.
The judge made a decision during a hearing between the proposal of special prosecutor Jack Smith, who wanted Donald Trump’s trial in Washington to begin on January 2, 2024, a timeframe she considered too short, and the distant deadline of April 2026 requested by the defense, deeming it “far beyond what is necessary.”
Donald Trump strongly denounced the set date for the beginning of his federal trial, calling this decision “electoral interference” in the 2024 presidential election. In a post on his Truth Social network, the former president, a candidate in the Republican primaries, accused the judge of “hating Trump” and announced that he would file an appeal.
Trump’s lawyer, John Lauro, had previously vehemently protested against the prosecution’s proposed January date. “You are asking for a show trial, not a speedy trial,” he denounced during the hearing.
If the schedule proposed by the prosecution were adopted, reading all the documents in the case would be equivalent to “reading ‘War and Peace’ by Tolstoy, from cover to cover, 78 times a day,” until the start of the trial, argued the defense.
Now facing charges in four criminal cases
But Judge Chutkan ruled out the option of a late trial. “You are not going to have two more years, this case will not be tried in 2026,” she declared on Monday.
Most legal experts considered the two-and-a-half-year delay requested by the former president’s attorneys to be excessive and expected a deadline closer to the prosecutor’s wishes.
Furthermore, the judge has already warned Donald Trump against any “inflammatory statement that could pollute the jury selection,” which could only encourage the magistrate to set a closer date for the trial.
This did not prevent the Republican billionaire from accusing President Joe Biden, without evidence, on Monday, of being responsible for his indictments, once again calling the Democratic leader a “crook.” The two men could once again be pitted against each other in the November 2024 presidential election.
The judge Chutkan’s decision is expected to weigh heavily on Donald Trump’s electoral fate, as he is now facing charges in four criminal cases.
What influence will these trials have on the Republican primaries?
The septuagenarian is accused in New York of suspicious payments to a former adult film actress, of negligent handling of confidential documents after leaving the White House – a case being tried in Florida – and of electoral pressures in Georgia during the 2020 election.
It is this last case, in the southeastern state of the country, that earned him his mug shot, an already historic photo, last week.
The trial dates have already been set for New York and Florida: respectively March and May 2024, but this schedule could change.
“I suppose the four judges in charge of these cases have tried to coordinate the order of the trials, and the New York and Georgia prosecutors will postpone theirs out of deference to the federal cases,” explains Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond, to Reuters.
According to Whit Ayres, a Republican political consultant, an acquittal of Trump in his upcoming first trial, regardless of the charges, would contribute to making his lead in the Republican primaries irreversible.
“I don’t see how it would be possible to stop him” in his race for the nomination, he said in an online interview. “But if he is convicted of a serious charge, I don’t know how people would react,” he continued, “because we have never experienced a situation that even remotely resembles this.”
With Reuters