super tuesday, obviously a little later but not a lot later than jack smith was hoping for, and much, much earlier than trump s defense team had requested. what do you make of the march 4th choice? makes a lot of sense to me, willie. plenty of time for the defense to prepare its case, to do what they have to do. you know, sometimes where you stand depends on where you sit. i spent a lot of time as a federal prosecutor in the eastern district of virginia, so-called rocket docket. cases moved expeditiously. continuances were extraordinarily rare. six months would have been an ordinary window of time to set a case for trial. so strikes me as appropriate. let me also add something, willie. the january 6th case in federal court in the district of columbia is a one defendant, four charge indictment. so it s really not all that complex. if the defense attorneys want to get ready for trial, my advice, and i don t mean this in a
chutkan, the federal judge in the district of columbia, was trying to do when she spoke with the new york state judg about scheduling. makes a lot of sense to me. you know, you put up the calendar. it is crowded. it s worth noting something that judge chutkan said. being a defendant in a criminal trial is not convenient. it is not intended to be convenient. lots of people who have busy schedules end up as defendants in criminal trials and have to put aside their personal lives to attend to these matters. that s exactly what mr. trump has to do. she wasn t sympathetic to the fact that he was a candidate for president. he has a matter he has to attend to in her court, and he d better be there. the calendar is crowded. there s a lot of time i should say, there s a lot of matters taking up a little bit of time, but that s the way it goes when you re a defendant in a criminal case. you have to attend to it.
idea. also, you know, judges, i think, have most judges are patient. most of them are thoughtful. but they believe deeply in the rule of law and protect the decorum of their courtroom. so the more that, you know, these folks come in and raise their voices and make wild accusations and, you know, say things out of court, including on social media, the more you re going to push a judge to do something you might not like. perhaps a gag order, perhaps a contempt order, perhaps something else. look, i think judge chutkan in this case was absolutely right to set a trial date in march. as i said earlier, plenty of time. it also sort of minimizes the amount of time that mr. trump has to cause mischief, and that s a good thing. chuck, i want to turn you to georgia. as we ve been discussing, mark meadows yesterday appeared on the stand and is trying to push that case to federal court. give us, first of all, your assessment as to whether that ll
successfully. chuck, elise jordan here. there are so many cases to keep track of. so many indictments. of all of the cases that trump faces and the legal peril, what do you think is the greatest threat that a judge would there would be possibly be a conviction by a jury? yeah, so there s different ways, elise, of sort of thinking about the cases and ranking the cases. i mean, in some ways, the new york case strikes me as the least compelling, but the evidence is actually quite strong. if you want to talk about the most serious case, to me, that d be the federal indictment in the district of columbia, the january 6th case. because it goes to the very heart of our democracy. elise, as you and i have discussed, this notion that a sitting president of the united states would use the powers of his office to try and overturn a fair and free election to thwart the peaceful transition of power, that is an extraordinarily serious case. so if you re talking about cases with very strong evi
making requests like that in front of a judge that they pay know is ridiculous. it doesn t curry you favor with the judge in the seriousness of the arguments you make. it was a bad strategic move. i m convinced it was driven by the client, not by the lawyers, as most of the bad decisions on the trump legal team are driven by. now, they ve got a march 4th date. you know, look, i think the thing for republican voters to think about out there is, this guy is going to be sitting in a courtroom starting on march 4th for probably six to eight weeks, depending upon the length of the defense case. at least six weeks. every day. not out on the campaign trail making the case against joe biden, which is what republicans should be doing every day. we simply cannot expect that someone who is facing this number of criminal trials, and, quite frankly, the conduct that underlies those charges, can be