Federal prosecutors working for special counsel Jack Smith slammed Donald Trump and his defense team on Monday for their pleas to delay the former president’s conspiracy trial to 2026.
Trump’s lawyers argued last week that they needed three years to properly review evidence in the case—equating the voluminous pages of evidence to being “taller than the Washington Monument, stacked on top of itself eight times, with nearly a million pages to spare.”
Prosecutors shot back in a motion on Monday that the Trump team’s claims were dubious, alleging the defense would have no need to review each of the 11.5 million pages individually. They claimed that pushing Trump’s trial date would “deny the public its right to a speedy trial” and continued to press for an imminent trial.
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“The defendant cites inapposite statistics and cases, overstates the amount of new and non-duplicative discovery, and exaggerates the challenge of reviewing it effectively,” wrote Prosecutor Molly Gaston in a motion obtained by The Daily Beast.
Gaston continued, “In cases such as this one, the burden of reviewing discovery cannot be measured by page count alone, and comparisons to the height of the Washington Monument and the length of a Tolstoy novel are neither helpful nor insightful.”
Prosecutors asserted that nearly half of the evidence being used in the case has long been available to Trump’s legal team. That includes 3 million pages from Trump entities; a million pages publicly available from the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 insurrection; and hundreds of thousands of other pages that came from the National Archives.
As for the rest of the pages, prosecutors said they were delivered to the defense in a form that allows them to digitally search for a particular document. That includes three million pages from the secret service.
Trump is staring down four charges in the case, including conspiracy to defraud the country and conspiracy to obstruct Congress. Prosecutors have proposed starting jury selection in December and beginning the trial in January.
If Judge Tanya S. Chutkan sides with prosecutor’s date request, the conspiracy trial would be the first of Trump’s quartet of indictments to go to trial.
