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      Prosecutors Criticize Trump’s Request for 2026 Trial Date in Jan. 6 Case

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      Defense lawyers had said they needed years to wade through 11 million pages of evidence, but the Justice Department, which is seeking to go to trial in January, said they were exaggerating the burden.Federal prosecutors pushed back on Monday against former President Donald J. Trump’s request to postpone his election interference trial in Washington until well into 2026, asserting that his main reason for the delay — the amount of evidence his lawyers have to sort through — was vastly overstated.Mr. Trump’s lawyers, in an extremely aggressive move last week, asked Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, who is overseeing the case, to put the trial off until at least April 2026. That schedule would call for a jury to be seated nearly a year and a half after the 2024 election and almost three years after the charges against Mr. Trump were originally filed.The lawyers said they needed so much time because the amount of discovery evidence they expect to receive from the government was enormous — as much as 8.5 terabytes of materials, they told Judge Chutkan, totaling over 11.5 million pages.As part of their filing to the judge, the lawyers included a graph that purported to show how a stack of 11.5 million pages would result in a “tower of paper stretching nearly 5,000 feet into the sky.” That, the lawyers pointed out, was “taller than the Washington Monument, stacked on top of itself eight times, with nearly a million pages to spare.”Responding to these claims in court papers on Monday, Molly Gaston, one of the prosecutors in the case, told Judge Chutkan that Mr. Trump’s characterization of the discovery evidence “overstates the amount of new and nonduplicative” material his lawyers will get and “exaggerates the challenge of reviewing it effectively.”Ms. Gaston said that Mr. Trump should already be familiar with much of the materials, noting that about three million pages came from unnamed “entities associated with” him. Hundreds of thousands of other pages, she added, have been publicly available for some time — among them, “the defendant’s tweets, Truth Social posts, campaign statements and court papers involving challenges to the 2020 election by the defendant or his allies.”Ms. Gaston also said that about one million pages of discovery came from the House select committee that investigated the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. That trove of evidence included hundreds of transcripts of interviews or depositions, a majority of which, she asserted, “are already public in redacted form.”Moreover, Ms. Gaston said, the government turned over a large trove of materials — including more than three million pages of documents from the Secret Service — that “should not require substantial time or attention from the defense team.”All of the material, she added, was given to Mr. Trump’s lawyers in a way that the defense could review quickly and easily “through targeted keyword searches and electronic sorting.”Mr. Trump’s proposed trial date, Ms. Gaston wrote, “rests on the faulty assertion that it is necessary for a lawyer to conduct a page-by-page review of discovery for a defendant to receive a fair trial.”“But the defendant can, should and apparently will adopt the benefits of electronic review to reduce the volume of material needed to be searched and manually reviewed,” she said.Mr. Trump has made no secret in private conversations with his aides that he is looking to win the next election as a way to try to solve his array of legal problems. To that end, he has often sought to slow down prosecutors in all four of the criminal cases he is facing.Indeed, if the former president, and the current front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, can push his two federal trials — in Washington and Florida — until after the election and prevail, he could seek to pardon himself after taking office or have his attorney general dismiss the matter altogether.Mr. Trump will not be able to pardon himself if he is ultimately convicted in Manhattan, where he faces state charges related to hush money payments to a porn star before the 2016 election. That is also true in Fulton County, Ga., where he stands accused with 18 co-defendants of tampering with the results of the election in that state.Prosecutors in the office of the Justice Department’s special counsel, Jack Smith, filed their own election interference case against Mr. Trump this month in Federal District Court in Washington. That indictment accused Mr. Trump and six unidentified co-conspirators of three overlapping plots to defraud the United States, to disrupt the final certification of the election and to deprive people of their rights to have their votes counted.Mr. Smith’s team has asked Judge Chutkan to set their case for trial in January. If that schedule holds — which is not a certainty — the federal election interference case would be the first to go before a jury.Judge Chutkan is expected to consider — and perhaps issue a ruling — on the question of a trial date when the two sides meet for a hearing in her courtroom on Aug. 28.The Manhattan case is set to go to trial in late March while Mr. Trump’s other federal case — one in which he stands accused of illegally retaining dozens of classified documents after leaving office — is scheduled to go to trial in Fort Pierce, Fla., in May.Last week, Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, Ga., said she hoped to take Mr. Trump to trial in her case as early as March 4. More

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      How Many of Trump’s Trials Will Happen Before the Election?

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      Donald J. Trump is the target of four separate criminal indictments, but the prosecutions could drag on for months or even years.Three different prosecutors want to put Donald J. Trump on trial in four different cities next year, all before Memorial Day and in the midst of his presidential campaign.It will be nearly impossible to pull off.A morass of delays, court backlogs and legal skirmishes awaits, interviews with nearly two dozen current and former prosecutors, judges, legal experts and people involved in the Trump cases show. Some experts predicted that only one or two trials will take place next year; one speculated that none of the four Trump cases will start before the election.It would be virtually unheard of for any defendant to play a game of courthouse Twister like this, let alone one who is also the leading contender for the Republican nomination for the presidency. And between the extensive legal arguments that must take place before a trial can begin — not to mention that the trials themselves could last weeks or months — there are simply not enough boxes on the calendar to squeeze in all the former president’s trials.“This is something that is not normal,” said Jeffrey Bellin, a former federal prosecutor in Washington who now teaches criminal procedure at William & Mary Law School and believes that Mr. Trump might only be on trial once next year. “While each of the cases seems at this point to be strong, there’s only so much you can ask a defendant to do at one time.”Any delay would represent a victory for Mr. Trump, who denies all wrongdoing and who could exploit the timeline to undermine the cases against him. Less time sitting in a courtroom equals more time hitting the campaign trail, and his advisers have not tried to hide that Mr. Trump hopes to overcome his legal troubles by winning the presidency.If his lawyers manage to drag out the trials into 2025 or beyond — potentially during a second Trump administration — Mr. Trump could seek to pardon himself or order his Justice Department to shut down the federal cases. And although he could not control the state prosecutions in Georgia or Manhattan, the Justice Department has long held that a sitting president cannot be criminally prosecuted, which very likely applies to state cases as well.Ultimately, the judges overseeing the four cases might have to coordinate so that Mr. Trump’s lawyers can adequately prepare his defense without needlessly delaying the trials. Judges are permitted under ethics rules to confer with one another to efficiently administer the business of their courts, experts said, and they periodically do so.“The four indictments can appear to resemble four cars converging on an intersection that has no lights or stop signs — but that won’t happen,” said Stephen Gillers, a legal ethics professor at New York University School of Law. “Well before the intersection, the judges will figure it out.”For now, Mr. Trump’s court schedule looks to be nearly as crowded as his campaign calendar, with potential trials overlapping with key dates in the Republican primary season. Claiming he is a victim of a weaponized justice system that is seeking to bar him from office, Mr. Trump may end up bringing his campaign to the courthouse steps.A federal special counsel, Jack Smith, has proposed Jan. 2 of next year (two weeks before the Iowa caucuses) as a date for Mr. Trump to stand trial in Washington on charges of conspiring to overturn the 2020 election. In a Thursday night court filing, Mr. Trump’s lawyers countered with a proposed date of April 2026.Fani T. Willis, the Fulton County, Ga., district attorney who this week announced racketeering charges against Mr. Trump, accusing him of orchestrating a “criminal enterprise” to reverse Georgia’s election results, wants that trial to begin on March 4 (the day before Super Tuesday).It is possible that the election interference case brought against Mr. Trump by special counsel Jack Smith may be given scheduling priority, the experts said.Doug Mills/The New York TimesMr. Smith’s recent case in Washington, and Ms. Willis’s in Georgia, were filed after Mr. Trump was already scheduled for two additional criminal trials next spring: in New York, on March 25, on state charges related to a hush-money payment to the porn star Stormy Daniels; and in Florida, on May 20, on federal charges brought by Mr. Smith accusing Mr. Trump of mishandling classified material after leaving office.Although the New York and Florida indictments were unveiled earlier, affording them first crack at the calendar, some experts now argue that they should take a back seat to the election-related cases, in Georgia and Washington, in which the charges strike at the core of American democracy. Trial scheduling is not always a first-come, first-served operation, and deference could be given to the most serious charges.In a radio interview last month, the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, said that having been the first to indict did not necessarily mean he would insist on being the first to put the former president on trial. However, he said, the judge in the case, Juan M. Merchan, ultimately controls the calendar.“We will follow the court’s lead,” Mr. Bragg said.There has not yet been any direct communication among judges or prosecutors about moving the Manhattan case, according to people with knowledge of the matter.Still, Mr. Bragg’s comments suggest that he would not oppose moving the Manhattan case, which carries a lesser potential punishment than the three others, backward in line.“My own belief is Alvin Bragg will be true to his word and remain flexible in the interests of justice,” said Norman Eisen, who worked for the House Judiciary Committee during Mr. Trump’s first impeachment and believes that prosecutors might be able to squeeze in three Trump trials next year.And Mr. Eisen, now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, argued that voters deserve to know whether Mr. Trump was convicted of subverting the will of the people in the previous election before they vote in the next one.“There could not be a more important question confronting the country than whether a candidate for the office of the presidency is innocent or guilty of previously abusing that office in an attempted coup,” he said.The most likely candidate to take over Mr. Bragg’s March trial date would be Mr. Smith and his election interference case. Recently, nearly a dozen Republican-appointed former judges and high-ranking federal officials submitted a brief to the judge overseeing that case, arguing that the trial should take place in January as Mr. Smith has proposed and citing a “national necessity” for a “fair and expeditious trial.”But this is the case in which Mr. Trump’s lawyers have asked for a 2026 trial date, citing the voluminous amount of material turned over by the government — 11.5 million pages of documents, for example — that the defense must now review. Mr. Trump’s lawyers estimated that to finish by the prosecution’s proposed January trial date would mean reading the equivalent of “Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace,’ cover to cover, 78 times a day, every day, from now until jury selection.”In that case, Mr. Smith brought a narrow set of charges against Mr. Trump in connection with efforts to overturn the 2020 election, totaling four felony counts, and with no co-defendants.In contrast, Ms. Willis’s election case is a sweeping 98-page indictment of not only Mr. Trump, who faces 13 criminal counts, but also 18 co-defendants, including Mark Meadows, the former White House chief of staff, and Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City. Already, Mr. Meadows has petitioned for his case to be moved from state to federal court, and other defendants are likely to follow suit. That process could take months and could be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, probably making Ms. Willis’s proposed trial date of March 4 something of a long shot.In contrast to the relatively narrow election interference case brought by Mr. Smith in federal court, Fani T. Willis, the Fulton County, Ga., district attorney, has charged Mr. Trump and his associates with a multitude of felonies related to the 2020 presidential election.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesThe sheer size of Mr. Trump’s Georgia case, and the fact it was the last of the four cases to be brought, suggests any Georgia trial of Mr. Trump could be delayed even beyond next year.It is exceedingly rare for a criminal defendant to face so many trials in such a concentrated period of time. The once high-flying lawyer Michael Avenatti seemed to be heading for three federal trials after he was charged in Manhattan in 2019 in a scheme to extort the apparel giant Nike; and, separately, with stealing money from Ms. Daniels, a former client; and in California, with embezzling money from other clients. (He was eventually convicted in the New York trials and pleaded guilty in the California case.)E. Danya Perry, a lawyer who represented Mr. Avenatti in the Nike case, the first to go to trial, said the challenge was “sequencing the cases in a way that would be most advantageous” to her client. And because there was some overlap in the evidence, she said, the defense had to be careful not to open the door for prosecutors to introduce evidence against Mr. Avenatti from another of the cases.“You’re not just trying the case in front of that particular judge,” Ms. Perry said. “Evidence from one case could bleed into other cases.”Before any trial, Mr. Trump’s cases are also likely to become bogged down as his lawyers review and potentially argue over large amounts of documents and other case material turned over by the government. Certain judicial rulings could also lead to drawn-out pretrial appeals.In the Florida documents case, disputes over the use of classified information could delay the proceeding as well. And in the federal court in Washington, which is already contending with lengthy backlogs amid prosecutions of hundreds of Jan. 6 rioters, Mr. Trump’s lawyers have suggested they plan to litigate complex constitutional issues, including whether some of Mr. Trump’s false claims about the election were protected by the First Amendment.Even the jury selection process could drag on for weeks or months, as courts summon huge pools of prospective jurors for questioning over whether they harbor bias in favor of or against the polarizing former president.Michael B. Mukasey, a former U.S. attorney general and longtime Manhattan federal judge, said because of the complex issues raised in all four of Mr. Trump’s cases, “I think the odds are slim to none that any of them gets to trial before the election.”And Mr. Trump’s criminal cases are not the only courtroom battles he’s waging.In October, he faces trial in a civil suit filed by Attorney General Letitia James of New York, accusing him, his company and three of his children of a “staggering” fraud in overvaluing his assets by billions of dollars. In January, Mr. Trump faces two civil trials arising from private lawsuits: one a defamation claim by the writer E. Jean Carroll and the other accusing him of enticing people into a sham business opportunity.“We fully expect both cases to go to trial in January 2024,” said Roberta A. Kaplan, the plaintiffs’ lawyer in the two private suits.Although Mr. Trump need not be in court for the civil cases, he almost certainly will have to attend the criminal trials, said Daniel C. Richman, a former Manhattan federal prosecutor and now a professor at Columbia Law School.“If you asked all the prosecutors in each case, they’d firmly and sincerely say that they want these trials to happen in the first half of 2024,” Mr. Richman said. “But wishing does not make it so.”Maggie Haberman More

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      Trump’s Lawyers Seek April 2026 Start to Jan. 6 Trial

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      The lawyers said the extraordinary delay was needed given the historic nature of the case and the volume of discovery materials they will have to sort through in the coming months.Lawyers for former President Donald J. Trump asked a judge on Thursday to reject the government’s proposal to take Mr. Trump to trial in early January on charges of seeking to overturn the 2020 election and to instead push back the proceeding until April 2026 — nearly a year and a half after the 2024 election.The lawyers said the extraordinary delay was needed because of the historic nature of the case and the extraordinary volume of discovery evidence they will have to sort through — as much as 8.5 terabytes of materials, totaling over 11.5 million pages, they wrote in a filing to Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, who is overseeing the case.In a bit of legal showmanship, Gregory M. Singer, the lawyer who wrote the brief, included a graph that showed how 11.5 million pages of documents stacked atop one another would result in a “tower of paper stretching nearly 5,000 feet into the sky.”That, Mr. Singer pointed out, was “taller than the Washington Monument, stacked on top of itself eight times, with nearly a million pages to spare.”“Even assuming we could begin reviewing the documents today, we would need to proceed at a pace of 99,762 pages per day to finish the government’s initial production by its proposed date for jury selection,” Mr. Singer wrote. “That is the entirety of Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace,’ cover to cover, 78 times a day, every day, from now until jury selection.”Mr. Trump’s aggressive request to postpone the trial in Federal District Court in Washington — a strategy he has pursued in all of the criminal cases he is facing — followed an equally ambitious proposal made last week by prosecutors in the office of the special counsel, Jack Smith, to get the case in front of a jury by the first week of 2024.Now that Mr. Trump has been indicted four times in four separate cases — most recently, on Monday in Fulton County, Ga. — prosecutors have started jockeying with one another to determine when the trials will be held. Complicating matters, Mr. Trump’s campaign schedule is set to pick up significantly this winter and spring with a series of primary elections just as he will be obliged to be in various courthouses in various cities as a criminal defendant.The judge in the other federal case that Mr. Trump is facing — one in which he stands accused of illegally holding on to dozens of classified documents after he left office — has slated the matter to go to trial on May 20 in Federal District Court in Fort Pierce, Fla.On Wednesday, Fani T. Willis, the Fulton County district attorney, proposed starting the sprawling trial of Mr. Trump and 18 others on charges of tampering with Georgia’s state election on March 4.And that was only three weeks before the March 25 start date for Mr. Trump’s fourth trial — one that will take place in Manhattan on charges related to hush money payments made to a porn star in the weeks before the 2016 election.If the prosecutors all get their way — and there is no assurance they will — Mr. Trump could be on trial more or less nonstop, with a few weeks’ hiatus here and there, from early January through perhaps mid-June at a time when his campaign advisers will surely want him out on the trail holding rallies and meeting with voters.Some of the former president’s advisers have made no secret of the fact that he is looking to win the next election as a way to try to solve his legal problems. If Mr. Trump, who is the front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, can push the federal trials until after the election and prevail, he could seek to pardon himself after taking office or have his attorney general simply dismiss the matter altogether.To that end, his lawyers have sought various ways to slow prosecutors in their race to get to trial and have tried to delay the proceedings where they can.Last month, for example, they asked the judge in the documents case, Aileen M. Cannon, to postpone that trial indefinitely, arguing that it should not begin until all “substantive motions” in the case had been presented and decided. At a subsequent hearing, they told Judge Cannon that she should push back the trial until after the 2024 election because, among other reasons, Mr. Trump could never get a fair jury in the maelstrom of news media attention surrounding the race.The lawyers tried that gambit again on Thursday with Judge Chutkan.Mr. Singer noted in his filing that not only were the discovery materials expansive, but the case also involved several novel aspects that made it, as he put it, “terra incognita.”“No person in the history of our country has ever been charged with conspiracies related to the Electoral Count Act,” he wrote, referring to the post-Civil War era law that governs the counting of electors to the Electoral College.“No president has ever been charged with a crime for conduct committed while in office,” he continued. “No major party presidential candidate has ever been charged while in the middle of a campaign — and certainly not by a Justice Department serving his opponent.”Mr. Singer also mentioned Mr. Trump’s increasingly crowded legal calendar, noting that the government’s proposal to go to trial in January “presents numerous conflicts” with what he genially described as “other pending matters.”As an example, Mr. Singer pointed out that the judge in the Florida-based classified documents case has scheduled a pretrial hearing for Dec. 11 — the same day the special counsel’s office has proposed starting jury selection in the Washington-based election interference case.Echoing Mr. Singer’s complaints, Christopher M. Kise, one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers in the Florida case, alerted Judge Cannon about the conflicting proceedings on Dec. 11 in court papers filed on Thursday night.Mr. Kise noted that he could “only speculate about the special counsel’s motive for offering dates in the newly indicted case that directly conflict with dates” in the Florida case, but seemed interested in making certain that Judge Cannon was aware of what was going on.“The special counsel’s strategy asking for a schedule in the D.C. case that culminates in a proposed trial date of Jan. 2, 2024, is not merely gamesmanship by a partisan Department of Justice,” he wrote. “It is a miscarriage of justice.” More

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      Special Counsel Used Warrant to Get Trump’s Twitter Direct Messages

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      The nature of the messages or who exactly wrote them remained unclear, but it was a revelation that such messages were associated with the former president’s account.The federal prosecutors who charged former President Donald J. Trump this month with conspiring to overturn the 2020 election got access this winter to a trove of so-called direct messages that Mr. Trump sent others privately through his Twitter account, according to court papers unsealed on Tuesday.While it remained unclear what sorts of information the messages contained and who exactly may have written them, it was a revelation that there were private messages associated with the Twitter account of Mr. Trump, who has famously been cautious about using written forms of communications in his dealings with aides and allies.The court papers disclosing that prosecutors in the office of the special counsel, Jack Smith, obtained direct messages from Mr. Trump’s Twitter account emerged from a fight with Twitter over the legality of executing a warrant on the former president’s social media. Days after the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, the platform shut down his account.The papers included transcripts of hearings in Federal District Court in Washington in February during which Judge Beryl A. Howell asserted that Mr. Smith’s office had sought Mr. Trump’s direct messages — or DMs — from Twitter as part of a search warrant it executed on the account in January.In one of the transcripts, a lawyer for Twitter, answering questions from Judge Howell, confirmed that the company had turned over to the special counsel’s office “all direct messages, the DMs” from Mr. Trump’s Twitter account, including those sent, received and “stored in draft form.”The lawyer for Twitter told Judge Howell that the company had found both “deleted” and “nondeleted” direct messages associated with Mr. Trump’s account.The warrant was first revealed last week when a federal appeals court in Washington released court papers about Twitter’s attempt to challenge certain aspects of the warrant.The court papers unsealed on Tuesday revealed that Mr. Smith’s prosecutors sought “all content, records and other information” related to Mr. Trump’s Twitter account from October 2020 to January 2021, including all tweets “created, drafted, favorited/liked or retweeted” by the account and all direct messages sent from, received by or stored in draft form by the account.The warrant, which was signed by a federal judge in Washington in January after Elon Musk took over Twitter, now called X, is the first known example of prosecutors directly searching Mr. Trump’s communications and adds a new dimension to the scope of the special counsel’s efforts to investigate the former president.Mr. Trump’s Twitter account was often managed by Dan Scavino, a longtime adviser going back to his days in his private business, and it was unclear if any direct messages were from when he was using the account.CNN earlier reported the revelation that Mr. Trump’s direct messages were sought by the search warrant.A spokesman for Mr. Trump, asked for comment, referred to a post the former president made on his social media website, Truth Social, on Monday, in which he called Mr. Smith a “lowlife” and accused him breaking into his Twitter account. “What could he possibly find out that is not already known,” Mr. Trump wrote.The election charges filed against Mr. Trump accuse him of three overlapping conspiracies: to defraud the United States, to disrupt the certification of the election at a proceeding at the Capitol on Jan. 6 and to deprive people of the right to have their votes counted.Mr. Trump’s relentless use of Twitter is detailed several times in the indictment.The indictment notes, for instance, how Mr. Trump used Twitter on Dec. 19, 2020, to summon his followers to Washington on Jan. 6 for what he described as a “wild” protest. The message ultimately served as a lightning rod for both far-right extremists and ordinary Trump supporters who descended on the city that day, answering Mr. Trump’s call.The indictment also describes how Mr. Trump used Twitter in the run-up to Jan. 6 to instill in his followers “the false expectation” that Vice President Mike Pence had the authority to use his role in overseeing the certification proceeding at the Capitol “to reverse the election outcome” in Mr. Trump’s favor.On Jan. 6, Mr. Trump continued posting messages on Twitter that kept up this drumbeat of “knowingly false statements aimed at pressuring the vice president,” the indictment said. Ultimately, when Mr. Pence declined to give in, Mr. Trump posted yet another tweet blaming the vice president for not having “the courage to do what should have been done to protect our country and our Constitution.”One minute after the tweet was posted, the indictment said, Secret Service agents were forced to evacuate Mr. Pence to a secure location. And throughout that afternoon, it added, rioters roamed the Capitol and its grounds, shouting chants like “Traitor Pence” and “Hang Mike Pence.”When the special counsel’s office obtained the warrant for Mr. Trump’s Twitter account, prosecutors also got permission from a judge to force Twitter not to inform the former president that they were scrutinizing his communications.If Mr. Trump had learned about the warrant, the court papers unsealed on Tuesday said, it “would result in destruction of or tampering with evidence, intimidation of potential witnesses or serious jeopardy to this investigation.”Twitter challenged this so-called nondisclosure order, arguing that prosecutors had violated the company’s First Amendment rights by seeking to keep officials from communicating with Mr. Trump, one of its customers.The company also asked to delay complying with the warrant until the issues surrounding the provision were resolved. Otherwise, it claimed, Mr. Trump would not have a chance to assert executive privilege in a bid to “shield communications made using his Twitter account.”Ultimately, Twitter not only lost the fight but also was found to be in contempt of court for delaying complying with the warrant. Judge Howell fined the company $350,000. More

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      Here Are the Possible Dates for Trump’s Trials

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      The unprecedented — a former U.S. president indicted, and while running for the office again — has now happened four times. Next up will be a presidential candidate going on trial. Possibly four times.We don’t yet know the timelines for all the trials, and the preliminary dates we have for some of them may still change. But it is already clear that across the board, prosecutors are seeking to move quickly.Extraordinary though the prospect is, it is entirely within the realm of possibility that Donald J. Trump could stand trial four times before the presidential election on Nov. 5, 2024 — and have to leave the campaign trail each time.Justice Juan M. Merchan, who is presiding over the state case in New York concerning hush-money payments to a pornography actress, has scheduled a trial to begin March 25, 2024. If that date holds, it would be just under a year after the indictment in that case.Judge Aileen M. Cannon, who is presiding over the federal case concerning Mr. Trump’s retention of classified documents, has scheduled a trial to begin May 20, 2024 — again, just under a year after indictment. Judge Cannon rejected the government’s request to hold the trial sooner, in December, but also rejected the Trump team’s push to delay the proceedings until after the 2024 election.The dates for the other two trials — in the federal case concerning Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, for which he was indicted on Aug. 1, and now in the Georgia case — are still to be determined.Jack Smith, the special counsel overseeing that federal case, has proposed Jan. 2, 2024, for the opening of the trial. That would be just two weeks before the Iowa presidential caucuses.Fani T. Willis, the prosecutor in the Georgia case, indicated on Monday that she would seek a trial within six months of the indictment, which would mean no later than mid-February 2024 — smack in the middle of the early primaries.There’s no guarantee that the judges in those cases will agree to those requests. More

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      Trump Attacks Georgia Prosecutor Fani Willis on Truth Social

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      As former President Donald J. Trump waits to learn if he will be indicted in Georgia over election interference in 2020, he has ramped up his verbal attacks on the prosecutor leading the investigation, Fani T. Willis, the Fulton County district attorney.In an all-caps post on his social media platform, Truth Social on Monday, Mr. Trump wrote that Ms. Willis was out to “get Trump” and accused her of prosecutorial misconduct. As he has before, he criticized her time in office, arguing that she was overly lenient on crime and had “allowed Atlanta to become one of the most dangerous cities anywhere in the world.”Mr. Trump’s attacks have been sharply personal. He has frequently attacked Ms. Willis with unsubstantiated claims, including an oft-repeated accusation that Ms. Willis, the first Black woman to hold her position, is racist.Ms. Willis has previously dismissed Mr. Trump’s attacks. In an email to her colleagues last week that was published by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Ms. Willis called Mr. Trump’s recent comments “derogatory and false” and urged restraint, writing that “we have no personal feelings against those we investigate or prosecute and we should not express any.”Mr. Trump has for years shown a tendency to aggressively denigrate his political opponents in an effort to discredit them. As he faces mounting legal woes, the former president has waged a similarly pugnacious campaign against the prosecutors who have investigated and accused him of misconduct. All of them have faced similar personal attacks from him.Last week, Mr. Trump’s campaign began running an ad in which he dubs four prosecutors — Ms. Willis; Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney; Letitia James, New York’s attorney general; and Jack Smith, the special counsel who brought two federal indictments against him — a “Fraud Squad.”According to the ad, all four lawyers are corrupt and “unscrupulous” allies of President Biden who are trying to keep Mr. Trump from winning the 2024 election. Ms. Willis, the advertisement says, is “Biden’s newest lackey.”In schoolyard fashion, the former president has given Ms. Willis and the other prosecutors nicknames. He calls Ms. Willis “Phoney Fani.” He has clarified that the misspelling is intentional: Ms. Willis has been investigating a phone call in which Mr. Trump pushed Georgia’s secretary of state to overturn the state’s election results.Mr. Smith has been dubbed “Deranged Jack Smith.” Mr. Trump has also referred to him on social media as a “lunatic,” a “thug” and a “psycho.”Ms. James, who filed a lawsuit accusing Mr. Trump of fraudulently overvaluing his assets, was labeled “Peekaboo,” a nickname Mr. Trump has yet to fully explain.Some of Mr. Trump’s attacks call attention to race. Mr. Trump has often called the three Black prosecutors investigating him — Mr. Bragg, Ms. James and Ms. Willis — racist, though he does not cite any specific evidence. Earlier this year, Mr. Trump called Mr. Bragg an “animal” backed by George Soros, the financier and Democratic donor. A group of civil rights leaders condemned the remarks as racist and said they veered into antisemitic conspiracy theories surrounding Mr. Soros, who is Jewish. More

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      As Indictment Decision Looms, Here’s What to Know About the Trump Investigation in Georgia

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      A grand jury could decide within days whether former President Trump should be indicted for interfering in the state’s 2020 presidential election.Starting on Monday morning, prosecutors in Fulton County, Ga., are expected to present a grand jury with the findings from their two-and-a-half-year investigation into former President Donald J. Trump and a number of his allies for their multipronged effort to overturn Mr. Trump’s narrow election loss in Georgia in November 2020.The grand jury will likely decide within days whether Mr. Trump should be indicted for interfering in the presidential election in Georgia. The former president has already been indicted in three separate cases this year, a staggering legal burden for a politician who is running for another term.Mr. Trump is far ahead of competitors in the race for the 2024 Republican nomination, and neck-and-neck with President Joseph R. Biden Jr. in a potential rematch, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll conducted in late July.Here is what we know about the investigation in Fulton County, which includes most of Atlanta.Why is Mr. Trump under investigation in Georgia?Fani T. Willis, the Fulton County district attorney, began looking into whether Mr. Trump and his associates violated Georgia law shortly after a recording was released of Mr. Trump talking by phone to Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, on Jan. 2, 2021. During the call, Mr. Trump insisted that he had won the state of Georgia and made baseless allegations of fraud, even though multiple recounts confirmed that he had lost.Mr. Trump told Mr. Raffensperger that he wanted to “find” 11,780 votes in the state — one more than he needed to win Georgia and its Electoral College votes.Over time, court documents and other public records revealed that Ms. Willis, a Democrat, was also investigating false statements that lawyers for Mr. Trump made in state legislative hearings; a meeting of 16 pro-Trump Republicans who cast bogus Electoral College votes for him; an intimidation campaign against a pair of Fulton County election workers falsely accused of fraud, and a successful effort by Trump allies to copy sensitive software at an elections office in rural Coffee County, Ga.An audio recording of Mr. Trump talking to Brad Raffensperger, secretary of state of Georgia, was played during a hearing by the Jan. 6 Committee.Alex Wong/Getty ImagesWhat laws may have been broken?In February 2021, Ms. Willis, in a letter to state officials, said the potential laws violated include “the solicitation of election fraud, the making of false statements to state and local governmental bodies, conspiracy, racketeering, violation of oath of office and any involvement in violence or threats related to the election’s administration.”That list may not prove definitive for a number of reasons, including that investigators probably had not settled on the final scope of their inquiry at the time. Outside legal experts have said that the Coffee County data breach could result in charges like computer trespassing and computer invasion of privacy.Ms. Willis signaled repeatedly that she was considering pursuing charges under the state’s racketeering law, which is often used to target members of an “enterprise” that has engaged in a pattern of criminal activity.The federal racketeering law is best known for being used against members of the mafia. But federal and state racketeering laws have been used in a wide array of cases. Prosecutors often use the laws to ensure that leaders of a criminal enterprise, and not just the foot soldiers, are held accountable.Who else is being scrutinized?The Georgia investigation may prove to be the most expansive legal challenge yet to the efforts that Mr. Trump and his advisers and other associates undertook to keep him in power after he lost the 2020 election. Nearly 20 people are known to have been told that they could face charges. They include Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York City mayor who, as a Trump lawyer, made numerous false claims about voter fraud at Georgia legislative hearings.They also include David Shafer, the former chair of the state Republican Party. He oversaw the meeting of the bogus electors in December 2020; more than half of the electors have been cooperating with Ms. Willis’s office.A number of lawyers who worked to keep Mr. Trump in power have been under scrutiny in the investigation, including John Eastman, Sidney Powell, Jenna Ellis and Kenneth Chesebro. Last year, Mark Meadows, the former White House chief of staff, was ordered to testify before a special grand jury that aided in the investigation.The Justice Department blocked an effort to seek the testimony of Jeffrey Clark, a former high-ranking lawyer in the department who sought to intervene in Georgia on Mr. Trump’s behalf after the 2020 election.A number of people whose names have been mentioned in connection with the investigation have said that they did nothing illegal, including Mr. Trump, who has described his call to Mr. Raffensperger as “absolutely perfect.”A Trump supporter protested election results at the Georgia State Capitol in downtown Atlanta in the days after the 2020 election.Audra Melton for The New York TimesHow does the Georgia inquiry relate to other investigations of Mr. Trump?Ms. Willis has said that she has not coordinated with Jack Smith, the special counsel in two federal investigations of Mr. Trump that have resulted in indictments. But Ms. Willis’s team has made use of the voluminous documents and testimony about election interference efforts produced by Congress’s Jan. 6 Committee.One of the federal cases is related to the former president’s handling of classified documents; the other to his efforts to reverse his defeat in the 2020 election. Another indictment, in New York State, is related to what prosecutors described as a hush-money scheme to cover up a potential sex scandal and clear his path to the presidency in 2016. Mr. Trump has pleaded not guilty in all three cases.What would come next?If the Fulton County grand jury decides to indict, any defendants will have to make their way to Atlanta to be booked and arraigned. A number of them could face multiple charges, and the potential sentences could be steep: Violating the racketeering law alone can potentially result in a five-to-20-year sentence.There is also the question of when a trial might occur, given Mr. Trump’s legal troubles in several other venues. If the Georgia case results in multiple defendants, pretrial matters like jury selection could take months. More

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      Grand Jury to Hear Trump Election Interference Case Early Next Week

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      The NewsAtlanta-area prosecutors have indicated that they will go before a grand jury early next week to present the results of their investigation into election interference by former President Donald J. Trump and his allies, raising the possibility that within days Mr. Trump could face a fourth criminal indictment.On Saturday, two witnesses who have received subpoenas to testify before the grand jury — Geoff Duncan, the former lieutenant governor of Georgia, and George Chidi, an independent journalist — revealed that they had received notices to appear before the grand jury on Tuesday. A spokesperson for the Fulton County district attorney’s office, which conducted the investigation, could not be reached for comment on Saturday.Former President Donald Trump at the Iowa State Fair on Saturday.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesWhy It MattersA state-level indictment of Mr. Trump in Georgia would follow closely on the heels of a federal indictment, unveiled this month, that is also related to the former president’s attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. But unlike with federal convictions, Mr. Trump, if re-elected president, could not attempt to pardon himself if convicted of state crimes in Georgia.Moreover, while the federal case brought by the special counsel Jack Smith names only Mr. Trump, details have surfaced suggesting that a Georgia indictment could name numerous people, some of them well known and powerful, who played roles in the multipronged effort to help Mr. Trump overturn his narrow 2020 election loss in the state.Mr. Chidi informed The New York Times on Saturday that he had received the notice to appear. Mr. Duncan on Saturday told CNN, where he is an on-air contributor, that he had received the notice to appear.BackgroundFani T. Willis, the Fulton County district attorney, has spent two and a half years investigating whether Mr. Trump and his allies interfered in the 2020 election in the state. Other investigations of the former president have resulted in indictments in New York, Florida and Washington, D.C.In New York, Mr. Trump was indicted in April on state charges stemming from his alleged role in paying hush money to a porn star. In June, he was indicted in Miami in a federal case related to his alleged mishandling of classified documents; the federal indictment regarding election interference came on Aug. 1.Mr. Trump has pleaded not guilty in those cases.The Georgia investigation may be the most expansive legal challenge yet to the efforts that Mr. Trump and his advisers undertook to keep him in power. Nearly 20 people are known to have been told that they could face charges as a result of the investigation.Mr. Trump’s lawyers have described an indictment in Georgia as a foregone conclusion in recent legal filings, and the forewoman of a special grand jury that heard evidence for several months last year strongly hinted afterward that the group, which served in an advisory capacity, had recommended Mr. Trump for indictment.What’s NextIf Mr. Trump is indicted in Georgia, he will have to travel to Atlanta in the days or weeks afterward to be booked and arraigned. Numerous security measures are in place at the courthouse, including orange barriers that now ring the downtown court complex. More