The right to a speedy trial. That is a bedrock of our judicial system, established in the 6th Amendment to the Constitution. Abridged for its relevance to the forthcoming trials of Donald Trump, it says this: “In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial… to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.”
The 6th Amendment is in everybody’s interest. Without a speedy trial, a defendant could lose the benefit of witnesses who might die or whose memories might fade, or of evidence that could disappear before the defendant’s day in court. What’s worse, the accused could languish indefinitely in jail before eventually being found innocent.
But there are other interests at play in Trump’s pending trials too. Namely, ours. What the 6th Amendment doesn’t say is that the public also has the right to a speedy trial, especially for the grave accusations that Trump inspired the insurrection of January 6th and conspired to stop the peaceful transfer of presidential power. Of the staggering 91 felony counts leveled against him now in four different jurisdictions, I’d argue that these are the most consequential and that therefore, they should be the first to be judged. They are about an assault on our very democracy.
Norman Eisen, a counsel for the House in Trump’s first impeachment, makes the best case for the public’s right to see Trump in court for abetting the insurrection: “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.” The gist of his argument is, we need to know that verdict before we cast our votes.
Toward that end, prosecutor Jack Smith has proposed a start date for that Washington trial of January 2nd, 2024. That’s less than four-and-a-half months from now.
Of course Trump sees it differently, and his lawyers make two arguments to delay the insurrection trial (and all the others) until after the 2024 election. One is, he’s running for president. It’s not fair, they say, if he has to bounce back and forth between courtrooms and the campaign trail. However, the judge assigned to the insurrection case, Tanya Chutkan, has already put that to rest. At her first hearing on Trump's case, she said, “The existence of a political campaign is not going to have any bearing on my decision, any more than any other lawyer coming before me saying their client needs to do their job. What the defendant is currently doing, the fact that he’s running a political campaign, has to yield to the orderly administration of justice.”
Their other argument sounds more compelling. Petitioning Thursday to postpone Trump’s trial until April of 2026— more than two-and-a-half years from now— attorney Gregory Singer argued that with more than 11.5-million pages of evidence to review by this coming January, it would be like reading “the entirety of Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace,’ cover to cover, 78 times a day, every day.”
But that’s only a half-truth. For one thing, the vast majority of those “pages” are digital, not hard copies. With the benefit of keyword searches, the magnitude of the job for Donald Trump’s defense is far less intimidating than his lawyers would have us believe. What’s more, there are countless duplications of emails and texts and transcripts and other notes that need not be reread. This is not to minimize the volume of evidence they have to review, but it is to argue that putting off the trial for two-and-a-half years would be an unnecessary delay, and would subvert the public’s right to a speedy trial.
The trouble is, there are lots of balls in the air. As The New York Times put it, “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.” That includes the two cases brought by special counsel Jack Smith, with his request to start the trial in Washington in January, and a trial date set for May 30th on the top-secret documents charges in Florida, and the request from the district attorney in Georgia to start Trump's trial with 18 co-defendants for racketeering on March 4th, and the New York trial about Stormy Daniels’s hush money, which already has a start date of May 20th.
And finally, just for good measure, yesterday a federal judge ruled that he’ll allow the defamation case against Trump by E. Jean Carroll— she’s the woman for whom he was convicted in May of sexual abuse— to begin in January. “Both parties are of advanced age,” the judge wrote, “and a stay of this case pending resolution of Mr. Trump’s appeal would threaten delaying any compensation to which Ms. Carroll might be entitled by at least several months, if not a year or more.”
So yes, putting Trump on trial in four different cities next year might be impossible to pull off. But how about just one? The most important one. The federal trial about the insurrection.
Still though, January 2nd for that trial might be too ambitious. Knowing that Trump’s time-worn legal strategy always has been delay delay delay, we can expect a mountain of pre-trial motions in that case, not to mention the tricky process of eventually choosing a jury to try the most controversial man in America. His lawyers have so much as said that they will draw out the process as long as they can. As a commentator put it on CNN, the date they really want is “the day after never.”
Legal analysts say that since proposed and established trial dates are in conflict, the judges assigned to the different cases can confer. And, putting aside the hush money trial and perhaps the defamation lawsuit, that since the insurrection case against Trump is considered the least complicated of the lot— just four felony charges and no co-defendants— they could conclude that it should be the first.
What’s likely, if that happens, is that Judge Chutkan will set a date beyond January 2nd, to give Trump’s team time to prepare, but still before the election. Maybe long before.
The nation needs that. A piece titled “American democracy is cracking” ran yesterday in The Washington Post. “In a country where the search for common ground is increasingly elusive,” it said, “many Americans can agree on this: They believe the political system is broken and that it fails to represent them.” Now add to that: many believe the court system is broken too. The Post’s reporters added, “Citizens in only a handful of democratic countries take a dimmer view of their government than Americans do of theirs.” A speedy trial of former president Donald Trump could help rectify that.
Over more than five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 37-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.
This is Greg and I rarely comment on comments, but for this one I've got to say, "my bad." My bad math, that is! Thank you for calculating the correction Ron.
Couldn’t agree more Greg. The disclosed elements of the governments case v trump argues that the J6 case should be tried now. Why would we allow someone who tried to violently overturn a presidential election to possibly get a 2nd try?