The desire of the Atlanta, Georgia, district attorney prosecuting former President Donald Trump on election-related racketeering charges to try him in March of next year is not realistic given the complexities involved in the case, legal experts told The Epoch Times.
Lawyers say racketeering prosecutions can drag on for years, and pre-trial jockeying by lawyers for the prosecution and defense also eats up a lot of time.
Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney Fani Willis, a Democrat, said she wants to try President Trump and 18 co-defendants—including his former attorneys—together in one trial beginning on March 4, 2024, which is 200 days from today.
Georgia’s GOP primary election is scheduled for March 12, 2024.
President Trump is also looking at a Jan. 2, 2024, trial in the District of Columbia, another March trial date in New York, and a May trial in Florida.
President Trump was indicted in Atlanta on Aug. 14 on multiple state counts over his efforts to contest the 2020 presidential election in the Peach State. His Democratic Party opponent, Joe Biden, triumphed in the official count and was awarded the state’s 16 electoral votes. He was sworn in as president on Jan. 20, 2021.
Charges range from violating Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, soliciting the violation of an oath by a public officer, conspiracy to commit forgery in the first degree, and conspiracy to commit filing of false documents.
Attorney Curt Levey, president of the Committee for Justice, a conservative legal advocacy nonprofit, told The Epoch Times that moving to trial in a racketeering case as soon as Ms. Willis proposes probably won’t happen.
“This is probably the most complicated—certainly not the strongest—but the most complicated [of the current Trump prosecutions] with all the defendants and the predicate acts [mentioned in the indictment],” he said in an interview.
“There are just so many details here. It’s just not going to happen, that it gets tried by March—unless the judge is completely deferential to Willis.”
“And one has to ask: what’s the huge rush?”
Ms. Willis and the prosecutors in the other three Trump cases have “given away their strategy,” Mr. Levey said.
“They’re less concerned with doing this in a thorough way to insulate it from successful appeal, than they are in making sure that the trials, and in their mind, hopefully the convictions, happen before the election.
“If you rush and you don’t satisfactorily deal with all the various pretrial motions, you certainly open yourself up for a successful appeal, but they don’t care because the appeal will be after the election.”
“As I’ve said, the goal is to try him before the election and tie him up so that he can’t effectively campaign and hopefully get a conviction before the election,” the attorney said.
Mark Miller, an attorney at the Pacific Legal Foundation, a national public interest law firm that challenges government misconduct, told The Epoch Times that aiming for such an early trial date in such a complex case seems unrealistic.
“Practically speaking, that seems like a very optimistic trial schedule where you have 19 defendants,” Mr. Miller said in an interview.
“Each of them will have their own attorneys. Those attorneys will have their own schedules—each defendant will have their own schedule [and] the judge is going to want to be reasonably accommodating to everybody’s schedule and any conflicts.
“This has nothing to do with politics—just the sheer practical reality of a massive conspiracy trial like this. You’re going to see some defendants potentially plea[d], some defendants potentially argue they’re immune, and any other number of legal arguments that will be made.
“You’re going to have arguments about what’s evidence and what’s not,” and these legal and factual arguments have to take place before the trial even begins, the attorney said.
“So it just seems unlikely that you could turn around a case of this magnitude in 180-plus days.”
Ms. Willis must know “her outlook is optimistic, but the point she’s trying to make is—this is an important case, and it should move forward expeditiously.”
“I don’t want to speculate on if she has ulterior motives,” Mr. Miller added.
But the state’s desire to move forward quickly “has to be balanced against the defendants’ right to a fair trial.”
There is a nearly 100-page indictment, and defense attorneys are “going to want to evaluate those facts, talk to witnesses, understand what underlies each allegation.”
“Some of them are simple, some of them are tweets, but some of them are going to be more involved. And a good defense lawyer, being a zealous advocate [for a client], is going to need time to defend their defendant.
“And it’s not just about President Trump, the way the prosecutor has framed it. There’s a lot of other people who have lives at stake,” Mr. Miller said.
The Epoch Times reached out for comment to Willis’s office.
Jeff DiSantis, deputy district attorney in the media relations division, had not responded as of press time.
The Epoch Times also asked President Trump’s legal team to comment but had not received a reply at the time of publication.
