How is a pre-Super Tuesday court date for Trump not election interference?
Tiana Lowe Doescher
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If Jack Smith is worried that half the country is coming to the conclusion that his breakneck prosecution of Donald Trump is a political witch hunt, he surely isn’t demonstrating any caution in public. Despite the former president’s push to delay the trial into his alleged attempts to obstruct the certification of the 2020 election, the prosecution succeeded in setting the trial to start on March 4 of next year.
In what is either the greatest coincidence in the world or an overt attempt to influence the outcome of the 2024 election, March 4 is exactly one day before the make-or-break Election Day of Super Tuesday. So what is the motivation of the prosecution here?
Judge Chuktan has scheduled pretrial motions to begin on Oct. 9 of this year, with motions in limine to start on Dec. 27 and proposed voir dire questions on Jan. 15. Recall that the prosecution has estimated that discovery will include nearly 13 million pages of evidence. About 8 million of those pages include documents that are otherwise publicly available or accessible to Team Trump, but 5 million pages consist of the grand jury transcripts. Recall that the grand jury only indicted Trump at the beginning of this month.
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Prosecuting a former president, much less one who is the dominant front-runner for the presidential primary once more, is already unprecedented. Even other federal cases do not provide us with much preview of what’s to come given the extraordinary nature of the subject. For example, federal trials usually undergo jury selection much quicker than other such trials because voir dire is conducted by the judge, not the counsel. But in Trump’s case, how is the judge supposed to find a genuinely unbiased juror? Who in the country doesn’t have an opinion, let alone a strong one, about Trump?
The timing of the trial also means that while the rest of the field is trying to campaign, the Trump campaign resources and marquee star will be forced off the trail and into the courtroom. Will that result in renewed energy for Trump among Super Tuesday voters, thanks to all the free media Trump will take from his competitors, or will the trial persuade Republicans to try a safer option? The answer to this question doesn’t actually matter. It’s rather the fact that we have to ask it at all that proves that regardless of the prosecution’s intention, the pre-Super Tuesday trial date is about as overt a form of election interference as anyone could possibly hope for.