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(Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
This morning Judge Tanya Chutkan set a March 4, 2024 trial date for Donald Trump’s federal charges of interfering with the 2020 presidential election. This was eight weeks later than the government’s proposed January 2 start, but two full years ahead of Trump’s preferred date of never … or possibly April of 2026.
Trump’s lawyers Todd Blanche and John Lauro had to know going in that the court would never allow them to put the trial off for years on end. Indeed their memo in support of the request was a veritable middle finger to the court, packed with overwrought whinging about the volume of discovery and dubious comparisons to the average time between indictment and trial in the District. For instance, they wrote that “the median time from commencement to termination for a jury-tried § 371 charge is 29.4 months—many times longer than the government’s proposal schedule.”
As the government noted in its reply, that data is from the period beginning October 1, 2021 and ending September 30, 2022 — i.e. a time when the courts were struggling to get out from under a COVID backlog and during which only 22 federal cases went to trial nationwide. Moreover, Trump’s 29.4 month statistic includes the time not just for the trial itself, but through the completion of sentencing.
The court called the number “a bit misleading,” according to reporter Brandi Buchman, who covered the hearing from the Prettyman Courthouse in DC.
Similarly, the defense’s melodramatic complaints about the volume of discovery in this case appeared to contemplate the attorneys locked in a conference room for years on end, going through the data page by page, without assistance from an e-discovery vendor — just Blanche and Lauro zapruder-ing the security camera footage until their eyeballs fall out. They even included this helpful graphic comparing the height of all the discovery if piled up, as compared to well-known landmarks.
If this was supposed to impress Judge Chutkan, who worked both as a public defender in DC and for decades in Biglaw, it very much did not. She castigated the defense for behaving like a pro se litigant, when he is in fact a billionaire with infinite resources to throw at the problem. And anyway, much of the discovery produced is either duplicative or, like Trump’s own social media posts, something with which the defendant is already intimately acquainted.
Nor did Lauro’s aggrieved posture, accusing the government of putting on a “show trial” engineered by Trump’s political opponent, play well with the court. Judge Chutkan admonished the lawyer multiple times to “bring down the temperature,” even as he grumbled that he would be unable to provide effective assistance of counsel in the proposed timeframe, and that forcing him to do so violated Trump’s Sixth Amendment rights.
During the hearing, Lauro previewed an avalanche of motions to come. He’s already promised to move for change of venue, dismissal, and selective prosecution. In response, Judge Chutkan warned the attorney about commissioning a poll of the jury pool in support of the motion to transfer the trial — something which might itself taint the jury, even as Trump’s social media posts skirt the line of witness tampering.
In the end, Lauro’s melodramatics proved mostly ineffective. Judge Chutkan announced the March 4 trial date from the bench, noting that she’d conferred with New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan about the false business records case in Manhattan, which is currently calendared for late March. Presumably, that will have to be postponed to accommodate the federal trial.
As of today, the Georgia RICO case is set for October of 2023, followed by the DC case in March, then the New York prosecution, and finally the Florida documents case in May.
Luckily, the former president is handling the stress with his usual gravitas and discretion:
Deranged Jack Smith & his team of Thugs, who were caught going to the White House just prior to Indicting the 45th President of the United States (an absolute No No!), have been working on this Witch Hunt for almost 3 years, but decided to bring it smack in the middle of Crooked Joe Biden’s Political Opponent’s campaign against him. Election Interference! Today a biased, Trump Hating Judge gave me only a two month extension, just what our corrupt government wanted, SUPER TUESDAY. I will APPEAL!
Yes, please, appeal a scheduling order to the DC Circuit. Do it and be legends!
US v. Trump [D.D.C. Docket via Court Listener]
Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics and appears on the Opening Arguments podcast.
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