The legal team of the former US president Donald Trump (2017-2021) requested this Thursday that the trial in Washington for his alleged attempt to reverse the 2020 election results not be held until April 2026.
In a petition addressed to the judge Tanya Chutkanresponsible for the criminal process facing the ex-president in the US capital, Trump’s lawyers justified their decision by the large amount of material that the Prosecutor’s Office has presented as evidence.
In fact, the document includes a graph that shows the height that a tower formed by the 11.5 million papers presented by the prosecution would reach, compared to that of the Washington Monument or that of the Statue of Liberty. In the image, the tower of papers is equivalent to a little more than eight monuments to Washington, “with almost a million pages to spare”according to the lawyers.
“To put 11.5 million pages into perspective, we started downloading the Government’s initial output on August 13, 2023. Two days later, it was still downloading,” they wrote.
The legal team assured that, if they immediately began reading the material presented by the Prosecutor’s Office, they would have to read the equivalent of Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” “78 times a day, every day” to reach the date proposed by the Government. for the beginning of the selection of the jury. Last week, the special prosecutor in charge of the case, Jack Smith, requested that the trial begin on January 2, 2024, just days away from the third anniversary of the 2021 storming of the Capitol, which Trump is accused of encouraging.
In its request, the Prosecutor’s Office estimated that the trial “will not last more than four to six weeks”, and considered that January 2 is a date that would give the former conservative president enough time to prepare his defense.
four charges
Trump is charged with four counts related to attempts to reverse the outcome of the 2020 presidentialwhich he lost to Democrat Joe Biden: conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct official proceedings, obstruction and attempt to obstruct official proceedings, and conspiracy against rights.
It’s just one of the four criminal proceedings which the ex-president is currently facing, along with charges in Georgia, Florida and New York.
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However, the judicial tangle seems to give Trump wings in his effort to win the Republican nomination to compete in the 2024 elections, in which he hopes to face Biden for the Presidency again, and for a long time the ex-president has dominated all the Conservative primary polls.
His legal team, meanwhile, has pursued a postponement strategyseeking to lengthen the processes as much as possible to take them beyond the 2024 elections.