WASHINGTON — The Department of Justice (DOJ) has objected to the proposed trial date of April 2026, requested by lawyers representing former President Donald Trump in a case accusing him of attempting to overturn the 2020 election results.
The special counsel’s team, led by Jack Smith, stated in a court filing that Trump’s lawyers exaggerated the amount of material they would need to review in order to be prepared for trial.
In defense of their request for an April 2026 trial date, Trump’s lawyers claimed that they were provided with 11.5 million pages of potential evidence by prosecutors. However, the DOJ argues that much of this includes duplicate pages or information that is already public, such as documents from the House committee investigating the January 6th Capitol riot and copies of Trump’s social media posts.
The prosecutors emphasized that the burden of reviewing discovery cannot be determined by page count alone and dismissed comparisons to the height of the Washington Monument or the length of a Tolstoy novel as irrelevant distractions.
Meanwhile, the special counsel’s team has proposed a trial date of January 2, 2024.
