Donald Trump’s agenda is complicated. Between elections and court cases, the former president’s calendar for next year is full of red marks. This Monday one more has joined. Judge Tanya Chutkan has set the steps of the federal case in which Trump is prosecuted in Washington for trying to subvert the 2020 presidential election, won by Joe Biden. Chutkan has set the date for the start of the trial on Tuesday 4, victim of Super Tuesday, the key day in the primary elections for the 2024 presidential elections.
Super Tuesday is the most important on the primary calendar. A total of 15 states elect their delegates to the Republican convention held in Milwaukee (Wisconsin) in July on that day.
Federal prosecutor Jack Smith had proposed the first week of January 2024 to start jury selection and start the trial. Trump’s lawyers, for their part, underlined the complexity of the case and the enormous volume of documents in the summary and, also alleging how busy the former president’s agenda is, demanded that the trial be postponed until 2026.
Trump’s lawyers highlighted in a letter dated August 17 that the case materials occupy 8.5 terabytes of information and add up to 11.5 million pages. “Even assuming we could start reviewing the documents today, we would have to proceed at a rate of 99,762 pages per day to finish (…) on the proposed jury selection date. That is the entirety of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, from beginning to end, 78 times a day, every day, from now until jury selection. Put the volumes of the summary one on top of the other, the paper mountain would reach some 1,500 meters in height, they argued with a graph included, the equivalent of 15 times the height of the Statue of Liberty in New York and more than eight times the obelisk of the Washington Monument, the tallest building in the capital.
In the charge sheet for this case, which was Trump’s third indictment, the prosecutor charges him with four crimes: conspiracy to defraud the US government, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction or attempted obstruction of an official proceeding, and conspiracy. to violate civil rights. Trump maintains that the elections were stolen from him, but the prosecutor does not accuse him for that great unsubstantiated hoax, but for his actions to alter the result and prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s victory.
One of the witnesses in this case is former Vice President Mike Pence, whom Trump pressured so that on January 6, 2021, in the joint session of the Senate and the House of Representatives, Congress would not certify Biden’s victory.
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Pence himself, in the first debate of the Republican primaries, recalled it last week: “The American people deserve to know that the president asked me to unilaterally reject or return votes, a power that no vice president in the history of the United States had exercised or taken ever, he asked me to put him above the Constitution and I chose the Constitution and always will.”
Trump denies it, but probably because he has a different concept of the Constitution. The images of the day of the assault on the Capitol haranguing the masses are eloquent. “If Mike Pence does the right thing, we win the elections, we become president and you are happy,” Trump told his supporters next to the White House, about two kilometers from the Capitol. “Mike Pence is going to have to cut his losses and if he doesn’t, it will be a sad day for our country. And Mike Pence, I hope you will stand up for the good of our Constitution and for the good of our country. And if you don’t, I’m going to be very disappointed in you. I’m telling you right now, ”he pointed at her over and over again. The mob of assailants to the Capitol got the message: “Let’s hang Mike Pence!”, they repeated as a rallying cry. The insurgents came to be within 15 meters of the vice president. Pence had to seek shelter for almost five hours.
(Breaking news. There will be expansion shortly)
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