Prosecutors push back on Trump's bid for April 2026 trial date

WASHINGTON (CN) — Prosecutors on Monday challenged Donald Trump’s lawyers’ assertion that the millions of pages of evidence turned over by the government warrant an April 2026 start date for trial in the 2020 election subversion criminal case against the former president.

Molly Gaston, a member of the special counsel team led by Jack Smith, argued in a reply brief that Trump’s request for a trial nearly two years into the next presidential term would deprive the public of its right to a speedy trial and misrepresents a large portion of the evidence the government has already turned over.

Trump’s attorneys of the firm Lauro & Singer argued in a proposal on Thursday that they needed a timeline equal to the government’s investigation into the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021 to review the more than 11.6 million documents from the government’s first batch of discovery. (Attorney John Lauro has repeatedly claimed the investigation took two and a half years while Justice Department says it only began investigating Trump’s role in March 2022.)

Lauro said that in order to adhere to Smith’s proposed Jan. 2, 2024, trial date, the defense would have to read Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” 78 times a day, and if the reams of documents were physically stacked, it would tower over eight Washington Monuments.

Gaston called those claims hyperbole.

“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 from the issue at hand — which is determining what is required to prepare for trial,” Gaston wrote.

Approximately 65% of those 11.6 million documents were already accessible or were duplicates, Gaston said, and about three million pages came from “entities associated with the defendant.”

Further, Gaston said the special counsel team had front-loaded the discovery process so the most important documents were turned over first, on the heels of a hearing over the judge’s Aug. 11 protective order.

A second production of documents came on Saturday, containing over 615,000 pages, about 20% of which came from entities associated with Trump.

Gaston’s reply offers a glimpse into the government’s initial production, linking hundreds of thousands of pages either to the National Archives, which Trump would have seen even before the government, or to publicly available sources like Trump’s Truth Social posts, campaign statements and failed court challenges following the 2020 election.

An additional one million pages came from the House Select Committee on the Jan. 6 attack, such as interview transcripts. Finally, about 100,000 are made of “duplicative material,” like copies of material shown to witnesses during interviews.

Earlier on Monday, the special counsel’s office got permission from U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, the judge overseeing Trump’s Jan. 6 case, to file a reply to Lauro’s April 2026 proposal, ahead of the next scheduled hearing on Aug. 28.

The Barack Obama-appointed judge hasn’t signaled how she’ll rule on the trial date but has already warned Lauro that if Trump continues to publicly share inflammatory comments — like repeated Truth Social posts targeting Smith and Chutkan — the “greater the need to move quickly to trial.”

Smith and his team evidently want the trial to begin as soon as possible before the 2024 presidential election campaign gets underway, and with a proposed date just after the new year, it could start before the Iowa Republican caucuses begin on Jan. 15, 2024.

The special prosecutor made a similar request in the ex-president’s other federal case in Florida over his alleged mishandling of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate after leaving the White House, asking for a December 2023 start.

U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee, struck a midpoint between Smith’s request and Trump’s, where his lawyers asked to delay beyond the 2024 presidential election, when she ordered a May 2024 trial date.

Trump, like in the Mar-a-Lago case, hopes that if the federal trial in Washington can be delayed, and if he can win back the presidency, he can avoid the charges by ordering his chosen attorney general to drop the case or potentially pardoning himself.

That strategy would not work, however, in the two sets of state criminal charges Trump faces in New York and Georgia, nor the three civil cases against him in New York. Trump would have power only over federal prosecutors, not those at the state level like Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg or Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis.

Willis requested a March 4, 2024, trial date for the former president to face charges over his alleged election interference, which resulted in 41 criminal counts for him in an indictment that also names his former personal attorney and ex-New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and former Georgia Republican Party Chairman David Shafer.

Trial in the New York case under Bragg is set for March 25, 2024. There, Trump is accused of falsifying business records regarding hush money payments made to adult film star Stormy Daniels during his 2016 campaign.

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