Federal prosecutors pushed back on Monday against former President Donald J. Trump\u2019s request to postpone his election interference trial in Washington until well into 2026, asserting that his main reason for the delay \u2014 the amount of evidence his lawyers have to sort through \u2014 was vastly overstated.<\/p>\n
Mr. Trump\u2019s lawyers, in an extremely aggressive move last week, asked Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, who is overseeing the case, to put the trial off until at least April 2026. That schedule would call for a jury to be seated nearly a year and a half after the 2024 election and almost three years after the charges against Mr. Trump were originally filed.<\/p>\n
The lawyers said they needed so much time because the amount of discovery evidence they expect to receive from the government was enormous \u2014 as much as 8.5 terabytes of materials, they told Judge Chutkan, totaling over 11.5 million pages.<\/p>\n
As part of their filing to the judge, the lawyers included a graph that purported to show how a stack of 11.5 million pages would result in a \u201ctower of paper stretching nearly 5,000 feet into the sky.\u201d That, the lawyers pointed out, was \u201ctaller than the Washington Monument, stacked on top of itself eight times, with nearly a million pages to spare.\u201d<\/p>\n
Responding to these claims in court papers on Monday, Molly Gaston, one of the prosecutors in the case, told Judge Chutkan that Mr. Trump\u2019s characterization of the discovery evidence \u201coverstates the amount of new and nonduplicative\u201d material his lawyers will get and \u201cexaggerates the challenge of reviewing it effectively.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ms. Gaston said that Mr. Trump should already be familiar with much of the materials, noting that about three million pages came from unnamed \u201centities associated with\u201d him. Hundreds of thousands of other pages, she added, have been publicly available for some time \u2014 among them, \u201cthe defendant\u2019s tweets, Truth Social posts, campaign statements and court papers involving challenges to the 2020 election by the defendant or his allies.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ms. Gaston also said that about one million pages of discovery came from the House select committee that investigated the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. That trove of evidence included hundreds of transcripts of interviews or depositions, a majority of which, she asserted, \u201care already public in redacted form.\u201d<\/p>\n
Moreover, Ms. Gaston said, the government turned over a large trove of materials \u2014 including more than three million pages of documents from the Secret Service \u2014 that \u201cshould not require substantial time or attention from the defense team.\u201d<\/p>\n
All of the material, she added, was given to Mr. Trump\u2019s lawyers in a way that the defense could review quickly and easily \u201cthrough targeted keyword searches and electronic sorting.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr. Trump\u2019s proposed trial date, Ms. Gaston wrote, \u201crests on the faulty assertion that it is necessary for a lawyer to conduct a page-by-page review of discovery for a defendant to receive a fair trial.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cBut the defendant can, should and apparently will adopt the benefits of electronic review to reduce the volume of material needed to be searched and manually reviewed,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Mr. Trump has made no secret in private conversations with his aides that he is looking to win the next election as a way to try to solve his array of legal problems. To that end, he has often sought to slow down prosecutors in all four of the criminal cases he is facing.<\/p>\n
Indeed, if the former president, and the current front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, can push his two federal trials \u2014 in Washington and Florida \u2014 until after the election and prevail, he could seek to pardon himself after taking office or have his attorney general dismiss the matter altogether.<\/p>\n
Mr. Trump will not be able to pardon himself if he is ultimately convicted in Manhattan, where he faces state charges related to hush money payments to a porn star before the 2016 election. That is also true in Fulton County, Ga., where he stands accused with 18 co-defendants of tampering with the results of the election in that state.<\/p>\n
Prosecutors in the office of the Justice Department\u2019s special counsel, Jack Smith, filed their own election interference case against Mr. Trump this month in Federal District Court in Washington. That indictment accused Mr. Trump and six unidentified co-conspirators of three overlapping plots to defraud the United States, to disrupt the final certification of the election and to deprive people of their rights to have their votes counted.<\/p>\n
Mr. Smith\u2019s team has asked Judge Chutkan to set their case for trial in January. If that schedule holds \u2014 which is not a certainty \u2014 the federal election interference case would be the first to go before a jury.<\/p>\n
Judge Chutkan is expected to consider \u2014 and perhaps issue a ruling \u2014 on the question of a trial date when the two sides meet for a hearing in her courtroom on Aug. 28.<\/p>\n
The Manhattan case is set to go to trial in late March while Mr. Trump\u2019s other federal case \u2014 one in which he stands accused of illegally retaining dozens of classified documents after leaving office \u2014 is scheduled to go to trial in Fort Pierce, Fla., in May.<\/p>\n
Last week, Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, Ga., said she hoped to take Mr. Trump to trial in her case as early as March 4.<\/p>\n