Promised to a legal marathon in 2024, Donald Trump now knows the date of his appointment with federal justice in Washington for his attempts to reverse the result of the 2020 election, potentially the most serious of the trials awaiting him. . The former tenant of the White House will be tried from March 4, 2024 in the capital of the United States. The fate of the former US president, favorite candidate in the Republican primaries, will depend on the decision of federal judge Tanya Chutkan.
Trump accuses Biden of being responsible for his indictments
Trump’s attorney, John Lauro, had railed vehemently on Monday against the prosecution’s proposed January date. “You are asking for a show trial, not a quick trial,” he denounced during the hearing. If the schedule proposed by the prosecution had been retained, reading all the documents in the case would be equivalent to “reading Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace’, cover to cover, 78 times a day”, until the start of the trial, argued the defense. But Judge Chutkan had already seemed to rule out the option of a late trial. “You are not going to be two years older, this case will not be tried in 2026,” she said on Monday.
This did not prevent the Republican billionaire from accusing President Joe Biden of being responsible for his indictments on Monday, without proof, again calling the Democratic leader a “scumbag”. The two men could once again be opposed in the November 2024 presidential election. Judge Chutkan’s decision could weigh heavily on the electoral destiny of Donald Trump, now charged in four criminal cases.
Four charges in less than six months
The septuagenarian is both accused in New York of suspicious payments to a former porn actress, of negligent management of confidential documents after his departure from the White House – a case tried in Florida – and of electoral pressure in Georgia during the 2020 election. It was this last case, in this state in the south-east of the country, which earned him his mugshot, an already historic cliché, last week.
Trial dates had already been set for New York and Florida: March and May 2024 respectively. of Georgia will postpone theirs in deference to federal business,” Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond, told AFP.
For Whit Ayres, a Republican political consultant, an acquittal for Trump at his first upcoming trial, whatever it is, would help make his lead in the Republican primaries irreversible. “I don’t see how it would be possible to stop him” in his race for the nomination, he said in an online interview. “But if he’s convicted on a serious charge, I don’t know how people would react,” he continued, “because we’ve never experienced a situation that remotely resembles this- this”.