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US District Judge Tanya Chutkan on Monday ruled that Donald Trump will have to stand trial in March for attempting a coup following the 2020 election.
True to the former president’s usual strategy of delaying cases brought against him as long as possible, his legal team had asked for the trial to be postponed until 2026. Trump’s lawyers argued that it would take them more than two years to prepare his defense.
Instead, they are getting six months.
Pointing to Trump’s well-resourced legal team, Chutkan suggested that this would give his attorneys ample time to get ready.
It probably didn’t help that Alina Habba, one of the former president’s lawyers and his legal spokesperson, suggested on live TV on Sunday that it wouldn’t take Trump long at all to prepare for a trial.
“[He] is not your average person. He’s incredibly intelligent and he knows the ropes. He also knows the facts because he lived them,” Habba said. “What is “[he] going to have to be prepped for? The truth?”
Now, Trump’s superhuman intelligence and other powers will be put to the test beginning on March 4.
If you are familiar with the primary calendar, that’s one day before voters head to the polls on Super Tuesday.
However, since Trump keeps insisting that he has already wrapped up the nomination and that the cases brought against him are a boon to his campaign and not a detriment, he must be delighted by this development.
His lawyers won’t be.
Special counsel Jack Smith has brought a very detailed case against Trump, and the coup charges are the most serious he is going to face.
It stands to reason that the former president’s legal team would have liked to get started with the trial that is supposed to begin three weeks later in New York.
Beginning on March 25, Trump is scheduled to face jurors for financial crimes related to trying to conceal the hush money payments he made to a porn star to keep their affair hidden from voters ahead of the 2016 election.
Generally, that one is believed to be the weakest case. Therefore, the best-case scenario for Trump’s attorneys would have been to avoid a conviction there, claim that the 91 charges filed against the former president for a variety of crimes are clearly a sham, and sow doubt about the other cases.
Therefore, this is good news for people who want to see Trump held to account.
In Atlanta, where the former president is facing more charges for trying to overturn the results of the Georgia election in 2020, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis had also indicated that she would like to take the case to trial on March 4.
Now, she might try to speed things up even more, which could be a tall order since that was the most recent indictment.
That is the one way in which the large number of crimes Trump allegedly committed are somewhat beneficial to him… it’ll be tough to schedule all of the trials.
In any case, he should get ready to spend a lot of time in courtrooms at the start of 2024… and who knows where he will be accommodated afterwards. Based on this development, the inside of a cell seems more likely than the Oval Office.
