That means jury selection would begin a day before Super Tuesday on March 5, when California, Texas and a dozen other states hold their presidential primaries.
U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan said her decision could not take into consideration the former president’s other responsibilities.
“Setting a trial date should not depend on a person’s professional obligations,” Chutkan said. “Mr. Trump, like any other defendant, will have to make the trial date work regardless of his schedule.”
Special counsel Jack Smith charged Trump with engaging in conspiracies to overturn the results of the 2020 election in order to stay in power despite losing to Joe Biden. The charges are conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, conspiracy against rights and obstruction of or attempting to obstruct an official proceeding. He has pleaded not guilty.
Smith had requested a Jan. 2, 2024, trial start date, arguing there is public interest in seeing the case resolved before the election. Smith said in a court filing that his team will need four to six weeks to present its case at trial.
Trump’s lawyer John Lauro asked the court in a filing for an April 2026 trial date, citing the amount of evidence he has received from the government. He said the prosecution will also need four to six weeks to present a defense.
“These proposals are very far apart and… neither are acceptable,” Chutkan said before announcing the trial date.
Chutkan pushed back on Lauro’s argument that reviewing the evidence is an “overwhelming task” for the defense, saying that Trump has known he was under investigation for a year and that his legal counsel had to review documents, such as items from the National Archives, before they were handed over to prosecutors.
“You’ve known this was coming, Mr. Trump’s counsel has known this was coming,” Chutkan said. “This wasn’t, ‘Surprise! He’s been indicted.’ ”
Chutkan instructed prosecutors to lay out how evidence already turned over during the discovery process was organized and placed into a searchable database, and dismissed Lauro’s argument that the defense will have to review millions of pages by itself.
“Discovery in 2023 is not sitting in a warehouse with boxes of paper looking at every single page,” she said, adding that most criminal prosecutions start reviewing evidence using keyword searches in databases.
Lauro said the lengthy time to prepare is needed because of the complex legal issues that will be raised.
“This is one of the most unique cases brought in terms of legal issues in the history of the United States, ever,” Lauro said.
Lauro said the defense expects to file motions related to executive immunity, along with a selective prosecution motion accusing the Justice Department of bringing the case to influence the 2024 campaign and as retribution for attacking Biden’s son Hunter Biden.
Prosecutor Molly Gulland Gaston argued that the issues Lauro raised have already been well litigated. She said that public comments by Trump and Lauro in recent weeks discount the claims of needing years to prepare, including Lauro’s recent comments on television about his preparations and strategy, and Trump’s claims of a 2020 election report that he threatened to publish last week before being arrested in a related state-level case in Fulton County, Ga.
Gaston also said that Trump had already litigated executive privilege issues related to testimony of 14 witnesses in five sealed proceedings between August 2022 and March 2023.
The March 4 date complicates Trump’s already full calendar, which, along with events for the 2024 GOP presidential primary, already includes several civil and criminal cases before summer 2024.