from what i reckon, team trump wants everything moved until after nov. 2024. betting on the chance that he could win that election.
they just can not state that so boldly in filings.
it was trump’s choice to run for office, and to announce early. he chose this path and he has to walk it. running for office is not a paid employment that keeps the lights on and food on the table. it is voluntary.
All true but not only that, it’s beside the point.
As Judge Chutkan astutely pointed out, running for office is Trump’s “day job.” No other day job steps aside for the administration of justice. Trump’s must yield to his criminal prosecution priorities, too.
As I recall, she said something like, “Running for office is something you want to do. Attending to your criminal cases is something you need to do.”
And it’s not like 2024 is the only chance for a president is elected. If he misses the 2024 election, there’s always 2028. Lots of people miss things because of trials.
Trump even claimed, this week, that he can prove that the election was stolen by Monday. He gave himself about a week to produce something that discredits the work of several state governments, who each spent 6-12 months reviewing the election and analyzing it for fraud.
I suspect that the judge will make note of that discrepancy in Team Trump’s capabilities.
I wouldn’t say it’s inevitable, but it is extremely likely. They will certainly be appealed, and the appeal may reach the Supreme Court, but the SC doesn’t have to allow a hearing. They can just refuse to hear the appeal.
How likely it is they’ll do that is a mixture of how solid the case against Trump is, and how partisan the conservative members of the SC actually are.
However, as others have pointed out, the SCOTUS conservatives are really McConnell/Federalist Society appointees, not Trump appointees, and there’s a good chance they’d rather see him sidelined in favor of a “true” conservative. My guess is that, if any aspect of any of these cases goes that far, they’ll slap it down hard.
They’ve already done that, repeatedly, with rulings on his motions leading up to the indictments as well as the Special Master rulings in Mar-A-Lago case. Not only that, they made it clear (without actually saying the words) that they didn’t appreciate Trump wasting their time. And the rulings were issued by Clarence Thomas.
I’m not worried about SCOTUS helping Trump out with any of his cases.
I don’t think the defense should get anywhere near three years, but didn’t you find the amount of evidence the defense has to review compelling? I can’t imagine trying to properly analysis all that material in 4 months like the prosecution is seeking, even with a 100 lawyers working on it.
Except, ya know, he lived it? I mean, if I’m accused of robbing a bank, and they have video of me robbing the bank, and phone recordings of me telling my buddy about my plans to rob the bank, and then afterwards telling him how cool it was robbing that bank, do I really need months to review all that shit?
The facts in this case aren’t really in dispute. Trump did most of it publicly, and has admitted that he did the factual things recited in the evidence. The issue in this case is, are those things crimes? He doesn’t think so, we do. All he needs to do is come up with an argument to convince the jury that these acts were legal. That doesn’t take three years. It shouldn’t even take three months, because he’s already made his arguments that his actions were legal.
To avoid any confusion… I am not defending Trump or his actions in any way.
Trump lived these actions, his attorneys didn’t. They can’t just say, well I don’t need to review the evidence because I’ve been watching the news for the past 3 years.
I am sure there are going to be 100s of facts in dispute. The overall narrative will be agreed upon, sure, but there will be a multitude of factual issues that will be debated about seemingly small items (who was in a particular room when X was said, was it this lawyer or that lawyer that advised Y).
I assume that Trump’s lawyers positions in Court are going to be quite a bit different then Trump’s positions in public.
Understatement of the year award winner!
What will take some time is for his defense team to examine the exact evidence which the prosecution has gathered (interviews, emails, recordings, etc.), and build specific defense arguments against those pieces of evidence.
I can certainly see why it might take longer than three months to do this, but unless his legal team is both (a) short-staffed and (b) incompetent, I have an extremely hard time picturing why they would need 2 1/2 years to prepare that defense. It’s so very clearly a stall tactic.
I would think the judge’s decision should be based entirely on the difficulty of the task in front of the defense; how long it took to bring charges is not directly relevant.
This is not like settling an argument between kindergartners—“Okay, Billy had the toy for a half hour, now you get a half hour.”
Yep. He can hire a team of lawyers in be ready in 3 months. Six months is plenty.
some of the material they have already. anything from the jan 6th committee is fully out and it is my understanding that his legal team has it. much of what they will be given from smith’s team will be duplicates.
there have been various investigations on this, team trump should have already been working on his defence. this indictment did not come as a surprize.
As I understand it, normally a law firm would have a bunch of employees whose job it is to sift through the evidence. But Trump doesn’t want to spend the money to hire enough people to do the job properly. In one of his motions he asked that the evidence be available to anyone, including volunteers, which is just nuts.
I’m all for people getting a fair trial, including Trump, but if he’s choosing not to vigorously defend himself then that’s not the court’s problem.
Exactly. My hope is that the judge continues to say, “that sounds like a ‘you problem,’ Mr. Trump.”
If only the Golden State Killer had thought of that approach. " Your Honor, law enforcement spent 42 years trying to track me down. I request a trial date in 2060."
I agree. It’s a specific, concrete link between the January 6th rabble-rousers and the ones that made up the Trump administration inside the White House. That’s big.
I can’t find the cite right now, but i do remember hearing/reading that, like in the documents case, the DOJ is highlighting, marking, and otherwise pointing out the parts of discovery that they plan to rely on or that seem particularly important.
Now, I can see the argument against relying on your opponent to tell you what’s important. But it’s also ludicrous to insist that each and every one of those millions of pages of discovery are vitally important and must be thoroughly analyzed for the next 2+ years. The case is relatively straightforward. If he needs a few more people to help the lawyers go through everything in time, well, he can hire more people. It’s not the prosecutors’ job to coddle defendants. Only to give them a fair opportunity to defend themselves.