DA seeks March 4 trial date for Trump Georgia election case

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis on Wednesday proposed a March 4 trial date for her case accusing former President Donald Trump and others of trying to overturn Georgia’s 2020 election results.

Willis also suggested that Trump and the 18 other defendants in the state-level election interference case should be arraigned during the week of Sept. 5, a court filing showed.

The Atlanta-area prosecutor had previously given the defendants until noon on Aug. 25 to voluntarily surrender to Georgia authorities.

Trump is likely to challenge the timeline sketched out by Willis’ office. In his other active criminal cases, Trump’s attorneys have advocated for delaying the trials until after the 2024 presidential election.

So far, they have not been successful. Trump’s criminal trial in New York, on charges of falsifying business records related to hush money payments, is set for March 25. A federal judge in Florida, meanwhile, set a May 20 trial date in special counsel Jack Smith’s case accusing Trump of mishandling classified records.

In a separate federal case charging Trump with election-related crimes, Smith’s office has proposed a Jan. 2 trial start.

“In light of Defendant Donald John Trump’s other criminal and civil matters pending in the courts of our sister sovereigns, the State of Georgia proposes certain deadlines that do not conflict with these other courts’ already-scheduled hearings and trial dates,” Willis wrote in the filing Wednesday afternoon in Fulton County Superior Court.

Trump has reacted angrily to those dates, claiming that he is being targeted with bogus charges as part of a conspiracy to undermine his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination.

A Jan. 2 trial date would fall just ahead of the first-in-the-nation nominating contests in Iowa, he wrote last week in a wrathful social media post. Trump’s claim that he is the victim of…