Attorneys for former President Donald Trump have previewed that they will be seeking to launch several legal maneuvers to gum up the federal election subversion case that has been brought against him by special counsel Jack Smith.
Whether the gambits push back the swift timeline US District Judge Tanya Chutkan has laid out for a March 2024 trial date may depend largely on her ability to keep the pre-trial proceedings on track; so far, she’s shown an extremely no-nonsense approach to scheduling and little patience for unnecessary delays.
At a hearing in Washington DC’s federal court Monday, Trump attorney John Lauro went into some detail about the challenges to Smith’s case – which brought four charges stemming from Trump’s plots to overturn his 2020 electoral loss – the former president’s legal team is contemplating. He did so as he told the judge that the case’s “legal complexity” required a lengthy pre-trial period.
(Chutkan’s March 4 trial date was two months later than what Smith’s office was seeking, but is far head of the April 2026 trial Trump had sought).
Overlaying the individual claims Lauro previewed is the bigger question of whether Trump, if his claims are rejected in the pretrial proceedings before Chutkan, can convince higher courts that they need to weigh in before the case goes to trial.
Usually, legal questions over how a trial was carried out – including whether certain charges should have been thrown out or whether certain evidence should not have been put before the jury – are reviewed by appeals courts after a conviction has been delivered. But occasionally defendants can successfully seek what’s known as an interlocutory appeal – or an appeal before a trial has wrapped up.
The standards for an interlocutory appeal are “demanding,” said CNN legal analyst Elie Honig, a former…
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