Former President Donald Trump speaks with the press on the Iowa Pork Producers booth through the 2023 Iowa State Fair in Des Moines, Iowa, Aug. 12, 2023.
Demetrius Freeman | The Washington Post | Getty Images
A federal judge on Monday set a March 4, 2024, trial date in former President Donald Trump’s criminal election interference case, putting the highest Republican presidential candidate on trial in Washington, D.C., seven months before the 2024 general election.
Trump vowed to appeal the choice as he attacked the judge on social media.
“Today a biased, Trump Hating Judge gave me only a two month extension, just what our corrupt government wanted,” Trump wrote in a livid social media post Monday afternoon.
“I’ll APPEAL!” he declared.
Judge Tanya Chutkan delivered her ruling after rejecting two wildly different trial schedules proposed by Trump’s attorneys and special counsel Jack Smith’s federal prosecutors.
The Department of Justice’s suggestion to take the case to trial on Jan. 2 “doesn’t” give Trump enough time to arrange, Chutkan said in a Monday morning hearing in U.S. District Court in Washington.
But Trump’s proposal for an April 2026 trial date went “far beyond what’s needed,” the judge said, NBC News reported.
The jury selection process within the D.C. case is currently set to start at some point before Super Tuesday, the largest day of elections within the presidential primary cycle.
Trump’s attorney John Lauro quickly rose to protest the trial schedule.
“In our judgment, that trial date is inconsistent with President Trump’s right to due process and the precise to effective assistance of counsel,” Lauro said within the hearing. The judge noted his objection before moving on.
Trump was not required to attend the hearing, but posted on Truth Social later Monday to rail against Chutkan and Smith.
Trump’s post appeared to reference a recent report — that a member of Smith’s team met with a White House official months before in search of indictments — as he repeated the claim that his legal woes are a part of a conspiracy to undermine his 2024 campaign.
“Today a biased, Trump Hating Judge gave me only a two month extension, just what our corrupt government wanted, SUPER TUESDAY,” Trump wrote as he vowed to appeal the ruling.
The previous president earlier this month pleaded not guilty to the four-count indictment charging him with illegally conspiring to overturn his loss to President Joe Biden within the 2020 election.
Trump, a top Republican presidential candidate who’s facing 4 separate criminal cases, has sought to maneuver his trials past the November 2024 election. But judges in two of his cases have already set trial dates starting in 2024.
Chutkan noted Monday that she spoke with the Recent York judge overseeing Trump’s case in Manhattan, which can be set to go to trial in March.
Fani Willis, the Atlanta prosecutor who has charged Trump with 13 felonies related to his effort to overturn his 2020 election loss in Georgia, had asked a judge in Fulton County Superior Court to schedule Trump’s trial on the identical day, March 4. A spokesman for Willis didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment on Chutkan’s order.
Smith, who’s leading Trump’s prosecution in his two federal cases, proposed in court filings earlier this month that a Jan. 2 trial within the D.C. case would “vindicate the general public’s strong interest in a speedy trial.” Trump’s attorneys responded that the trial should start greater than two-and-a-half years later, claiming that they need a major period of time to sift through the thousands and thousands of pages of potential evidence.
Trump has already lashed out on the special counsel as an “out of touch lunatic” for asking for a trial date that will likely overlap with the Iowa caucuses, that are scheduled for Jan. 15.
The hearing itself grew heated when defense attorney Lauro declared that it was an “outrage of justice” for the federal government to hunt such a fast trial date.
“Let’s take the temperature down,” Chutkan responded.
The special counsel previously accused Trump’s lawyers of exaggerating the quantity of evidence that they may must sift through and making unhelpful comparisons, comparable to claiming that the variety of pages of discovery material would stack up nearly 5,000 feet high.
Lauro in Monday’s hearing said the duty of preparing for a case with a lot discovery was “enormous” and “overwhelming.” He argued that they can not be ready in a shorter time-frame than the one they proposed.
But Chutkan was unconvinced. “This case is not going to trial in 2026, and I need to know, despite the rhetoric in your response to the federal government’s trial date, realistically why you think that you wish this time,” she said.
She noted that “a major amount of this discovery is duplicative,” adding that Trump’s attorneys have known the indictment was coming “for quite a while.”
Lauro reiterated that the defense team will “must absorb a gargantuan amount of facts.” Trump “just isn’t above the law, but he isn’t below the law,” the attorney declared.
The hearing also addressed the federal procedures for handling the “small amount of classified information” that the federal government said it has identified within the case.
Trump is currently the clear front-runner in polls of the Republican presidential primary field. Trump has repeatedly claimed to be the victim of “election interference,” which is basically what he’s accused of in D.C. and within the state-level criminal case in Georgia.
Trump also faces federal criminal charges in Florida stemming from Smith’s probe of the previous president’s handling of classified records after leaving office in early 2021.
That case is scheduled to go to trial in May. Trump has pleaded not guilty to the 40 felony counts he faces in that case.
— CNBC’s Dan Mangan contributed to this report.
