Trump Judge Claims Defense Should Have Started BEFORE Indictment!

(TeaParty.org Exclusive) – What’s happening to former President Donald Trump with the numerous indictments he’s currently facing is an absolute abuse of America’s justice system and is infuriating to witness in real time. The latest outrage from this mess comes from a hearing that was held on Monday where Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is presiding over the case involving his alleged involvement in the Jan. 6 riot, stated that Trump’s legal team should have started picking through evidence well before the indictment was made official. She then presented an argument against the 2026 start date the former president’s attorneys suggested for the 2020 federal election case.

Julie Kelly obtained a transcript of the hearing and highlight some comments made by Chutkan during the proceedings, publishing them on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, which had the judge saying, “the government hasn’t identified any cases in this district where the length of time between the indictment and trial was roughly five months, although they did point to the Manafort case in the Eastern District of Virginia, which went to trial roughly five months after the superseding indictment.”

Chutkan then remarked that “the manner in which the discovery in this case has been organized indicates that the government has made a considerable effort to expedite review.”

“Prosecutors had pushed back against the 2026 start date, arguing that Trump should already be familiar with much of the discovery materials, with prosecutor Molly Gaston writing in a previous court paper that around three million pages came from ‘entities associated with’ Trump,” Hannah Nightingale of The Post Millennial reported.

A massive amount of pages, numbering somewhere in the hundreds of thousands, have already been released to the general public, they went on to say, listed among them are “the defendant’s tweets, Truth Social posts, campaign statements and court papers involving challenges to the 2020 election by the defendant or his allies.”

According to Gaston, there were close to a million pages that came from the House Select Committee on January 6. Included in this massive volume of documentation were interviews and depositions that she pointed out were “already public in redacted form.”

“Chutkan, speaking to Trump’s attorney John Lauro, said that he didn’t need more time than to the March 4 trial date to review the millions of pages of evidence. She said that this evidence, though it may be new to Lauro, ‘is material your client created or material that your client’s lawyers, maybe not you specifically, saw and reviewed and had possession of before this case,'” Nightingale noted.

Lauro requested the start date for the trial be pushed off until April 2026 in order to provide the defense with enough time to sift through the massive amount of information and data, which is around 12.8 million pages, in the discovery phase that has been given to them by the Justice Department.

“For a federal prosecutor to suggest that we could go to trial in four months is not only absurd, it’s a violation of the oath of justice,” Lauro went on to say, as per a report published by the New York Times, saying, “We cannot do this in the time frame the government has outlined.”

“You suggest that the defense needs a substantial amount of time to investigate, for example. The existence of the grand jury investigating in this case has been known for — since September 2022, almost a year, has been public knowledge,” she commented.

Lauro then made the case that “there’s no obligation for any American citizen to start conducting their own defense during a grand jury investigation and prepare for a trial when we don’t even know what the issues are, what the charges are.”

Chutkan, oh so graciously agreeing with the basic premise of Lauro’s statement, replied by stating that while no obligation exists to do so, “a good defense attorney, knowing that their client was under investigation by a grand jury … would already start.”

The judge then slammed the notion of delaying the start of the trial by arguing that “it’s not an unveiling — a surprise he’s been indicted. You’ve known this was coming. Mr. Trump’s counsel has known this was coming for some time.”

Chutkan ultimately set a start date for the trial of March 4, 2024, which is just one day before Super Tuesday in the GOP primary race, where 14 states will head to the polls to cast their vote for who they believe should represent the Republican Party in the general election against President Joe Biden.

It just so happens the start date is also 20 days before the former president’s Manhattan trial is due to begin, which was brought forth by District Attorney Alvin Bragg concerning the alleged falsification of business records.

Trump, ever the fighter, has promised he will not go down without swinging for the fences, saying, “Deranged Jack Smith & his team of Thugs, who were caught going to the White House just prior to Indicting the 45th President of the United States (an absolute No No!), have been working on this Witch Hunt for almost 3 years, but decided to bring it smack in the middle of Crooked Joe Biden’s Political Opponent’s campaign against him.”

“Today a biased, Trump Hating Judge gave me only a two month extension, just what our corrupt government wanted, SUPER TUESDAY. I will APPEAL!” he concluded.

Copyright 2023. TeaParty.org

© 2023 Fellow American Daily. All Rights Reserved.