trump s team is arguing tonight that the federal 2020 election case brought by special counsel jack smith should go to trial in april of 2026. that is a whopping two years, seven months, and 16 days from now. it notably comes well after the point in which trump could be back in office, and able to pardon himself, or just make this case disappear altogether. his legal team s justification for this date is it is classically trumpy. remember, if you will, when president trump first took office and had to prove to everyone that he had disentangled himself from his business interests, and he stood next to this giant pile of folders. there they are. and claimed that they contain the evidence he unsigned everything over to his sons. now, trump refused to let anyone actually look at the contents of those folders, but, hey it was a lot of paper, it was a lot of folders.
inflammatory statements about this case, which could taint the jury pool or intimidate potential witnesses, the greater the urgency will be that we proceed to trial quickly. there are a lot of reasons to think trump s april of 2026 is unrealistic, but this, the one outlined by the judge might be number one. look at what happened today, for example. today, trump and his former attorney general bill barr. trump was on business, barr was on fox news. both of them were happening at four pm remember, bill barr announced his resignation as attorney general on the day that the trumps fake electors met all over the country, december 14th 2020. trump had asked barr to use the department to name special counsel to investigate voter fraud, and a huge department of justice to seize voting machines.
so, as you said, as you suggested, this is working against his interest if in fact he wants to delay this as much as possible. just another sort of legal note, barb, to your point this evidence will be digested in a way that is not like reading war and peace. there is also the manpower concern. it s not just one lawyer that is going to be tasked with doing that, presumably, but we talked about this last night. trump does have a skeletal legal crew assisting him in all this. i think todd blanche who was representing trump in three cases is part of a law firm that has two lawyers. the question i think at some point needs to be posed, when will trump actually spend the money to hire more lawyers to deal with all this? that seems like a necessity at this point, does it not? i mean, most of the time in a big white collar case like this you ll see a firm that has sufficient resources where they
every indictment that i have seen in my 17 years as a prosecutor, you then go on to list the names of the grand jurors who heard the matter and you cross off the names of anyone who was not there that day or didn t hear that evidence. this is required by the code. the only instance that i have been able to find where it is not required is when the grand jury is investigating a use of force case by a peace officer, a use of deadly force case, and after hearing evidence they decide not to return an indictment. that is not the case that we have here. so it was required by law that these names be listed, and it is unfortunate that some apparently, have taken it upon themselves to provide private information about these residents who were doing their civic duty, and now we are seeing the threats that we are seeing through various
that s it, we have no idea how much of the evidence provided here will be duplicate information or how much of it includes things trump has always had access to, like for example the contents of his own twitter account. moreover, typically it s not just one person doing all that reading, it s why people retain entire legal teams to help them in cases like this. nonetheless, trump and his lawyers argue that they will not be ready to go to trial until april of the year 2026. this is a decidedly different date than the one proposed by jack smith s team, which would like a trial date set for january 2nd of the year 2024 which is well before the presidential election. ultimately, both these states are just suggestions. the trial date in this case is the judges decision. at a hearing last friday, the judge presiding over this case made it very clear that a key deciding factor here as far as the date was going to be how trump conducted himself outside of the courtroom.