Special Counsel Reacts to Donald Trump Stalling Tactics – Special Counsel Jack Smith’s office filed motions opposing former President Donald Trump’s effort to delay his trials until after the 2024 presidential election, after which, should he win, he could pardon himself and shut down the prosecution.
Trump attorneys John Lauro and Todd Blanche have claimed they are unable to review the prosecution’s evidence against their client in time to prepare for his scheduled Mar. 4, 2024 trial.
They failed to get Federal District Judge Tanya Chutkan to delay the trial until 2026 in August.
The lawyers asked Wednesday to extend the filing deadlines for subpoenas in the case for another three-month period.
The lawyers have roughly 13 million documents to review.
“The defendant’s misleading criticism of the way the Government produced emails exposes that he is grasping at straws for an excuse to delay these proceedings,” Assistant Counsels Thomas Windom and Molly Gaston wrote in their motion to Chutkan seeking to quash the delaying tactics, calling them a “robotic incantation” of every prior unsuccessful motion to extend the discovery process.
Prosecutors Push Judge in Documents Case Not to Delay
The special counsel’s office similarly sought to quash an effort by Trump’s attorneys in the classified documents case to get Federal District Judge Aileen Cannon to adjourn her trial without informing her that he was asking for a stay of the January 6 case from Chutkan.
Cannon set the documents trial for May 20; however, she suggested extending the date pending the resolution of Chutkan’s trial.
“I’m just having a hard time seeing how realistically this work can be accomplished in this compressed period of time, given the realities that we’re facing,” Cannon told lawyers at a hearing here on Wednesday.
She made no immediate ruling as to whether she would grant the Trump legal team’s request to push the trial date back. Cannon noted that she would set a new timeline for the trial “as soon as possible.”
Prosecutors Claim Donald Trump Misled Judge in Documents Case
Smith’s office noted in a motion Thursday to Cannon that “defendant Trump’s counsel failed to disclose at the hearing that they were planning to file – and yesterday evening did file – the attached motion to stay the proceedings in the District of Columbia until their motion to dismiss the indictment based on presidential immunity is ‘fully resolved.’”
“Defendant Trump’s actions in the hours following the hearing … in this case illustrate the point and confirm his overriding interest in delaying both trials at any cost. This Court should allow itself to be manipulated in this fashion,” Smith’s office said.
Veteran Justice Department national security prosecutor Jay Bratt, Smith’s deputy in the case, told Cannon that Trump’s motion to assert presidential immunity could lead to the dismissal of the January 6 case.
“The court really cannot let and should not let the D.C. trial drive the schedule here,” Bratt said. “We don’t know what is going to happen in this case. We don’t know what’s going to happen in the D.C. case. That trial could disappear.”
Trump attorney Chris Kise phoned into the former president’s fraud trial that threatens to dismantle his business empire warning that the trial schedule was making it hard to defend his client.
“It’s very difficult to be trying to work with a client in one trial and simultaneously try to prepare that client for another trial,” Kise said. “This has been a struggle and a challenge.”
John Rossomando is a defense and counterterrorism analyst and served as Senior Analyst for Counterterrorism at The Investigative Project on Terrorism for eight years. His work has been featured in numerous publications such as The American Thinker, The National Interest, National Review Online, Daily Wire, Red Alert Politics, CNSNews.com, The Daily Caller, Human Events, Newsmax, The American Spectator, TownHall.com, and Crisis Magazine. He also served as senior managing editor of The Bulletin, a 100,000-circulation daily newspaper in Philadelphia, and received the Pennsylvania Associated Press Managing Editors first-place award for his reporting.
