The US judge Tanya S. Chutkan, in charge of the process against former President Donald Trump for trying to annul the 2020 elections, has decided this Monday that the trial date will be March 4, 2024.
Trump and the assault on the Capitol: all the evidence that incriminates the former president
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The magistrate, who will judge the case that culminated in the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, has made the announcement after a hearing held in the US capital, as reported by the press in this country.
The set calendar means that Trump’s trial will arrive in the middle of the 2024 Republican primary season. Specifically, one day before ‘Super Tuesday’, which will be March 5, 2024 and is the closest thing there is in the United States to a national primary, since more than a dozen both Republican and Democratic states will simultaneously hold internal processes to choose their candidates.
The judge has thus dismissed the wish of the special prosecutor, Jack Smith, that the trial start in January 2024, on a date close to the anniversary of the assault on the Capitol.
Also the interest of the defense of the former president to postpone the process until after the next presidential elections, which will be held in November 2024 and in which Trump is still the favorite Republican candidate. They had requested that the trial begin in April 2026.
The former president is accused in Washington DC of four counts: conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official procedure, obstruction and attempt to obstruct an official procedure and conspiracy against rights.
For the first of these charges, he could be sentenced to a maximum of five years in prison, for the second and third, 20 years in prison, respectively, and for the fourth, ten years.
The indictment describes how after losing the November 3, 2020 election to Democrat Joe Biden, the then-president embarked on a conspiracy to “reverse the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election” with false claims that there was electoral fraud and multiple stratagems.
Trump’s other cases
This Monday’s announcement came a few minutes after it became known that the indictment against the former president and 18 other defendants in Georgia for trying to reverse the results of the 2020 elections in that state will take place on September 6. All 19 will then have the opportunity to plead guilty or not guilty.
Trump has pleaded not guilty in the other three criminal cases in which he is also charged: for irregular payments to porn actress Stormy Daniels to hush up her past “affair” during the 2016 campaign, for illegally taking the House Blanca classified papers when leaving power and for the assault on the Capitol.
Trump went to Georgia last Thursday to be booked and have his mugshot taken. He was in the Fulton County Jail for just 20 minutes and was released on $200,000 bail.
The prosecutor in charge of the case, the Democrat Fani Willis, proposed that same day to the court that the trial start on October 23 and not on March 4 of next year, as she had originally proposed. The judge kept that date for only one of the defendants, attorney Kenneth Chesebro, who had requested a speedy trial, but no date is yet known for the rest.
The start of the process against Trump for irregular payments to the porn actress Stormy Daniels is set for March 25, 2024 in New York. The trial in Florida for the classified papers that he took from the White House to his mansion in Mar-a-Lago (Florida) is scheduled for May 20, 2024, when there will be just over 6 months left for the presidential elections.
