'Inherently arbitrary': Trump ally Jeff Clark attacks Jack Smith over 2024 D.C. trial date
A former Donald Trump lawyer who was indicted alongside the ex-president in Georgia is hitting back against Jack Smith's D.C. criminal case.
Jeff Clark, the former Trump official who was recently smacked down for a "creative" attempt to avoid prosecution, was responding to a right-wing article suggesting the case being overseen by Judge Chutkan is the best hope for anyone to stop Trump.
"That's what the 'J6/2020' case is all about -- a Hail Mary designed to try to destroy Trump before the election and usher Biden (or some other Democrat) back into the White House on 1/20/25," Clark wrote on Wednesday. "The March 2024 trial date Judge Chutkan set is an arbitrary date -- to be clear, it's one she had discretion to set as all Judges inherently control their own dockets. Though even there, it's a case that objectively should take longer to get to trial. It's something a Judge could do, but it's also an overly aggressive date many Judges would have opted against."
However you look at it, according to Clark, "the March 2024 date is inherently arbitrary."
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"So Jack Smith's bid to accelerate the appeal of the case to the Supreme Court partakes of the same basic arbitrariness. No objective feature of the law or the facts requires the protection at all costs of a March 2024 trial date," he wrote. "It's just what Jack Smith and a host of political opponents of President Trump want. That's it."
Clark added that it's "a fervent desire but March 2024 is not a date fixed in the astrological movements of the heavens or etched in stone by the hand of God."
"The Supreme Court should ignore the politics and let the case proceed on the ordinary track. And if the March 2024 trial date has to slip as a result of that, it has to slip," Clark wrote. "Remember, Jack Smith was in full control of when this case was brought. He could have brought it sooner. But it was instead strategically designed to be brought not too early nor too late to have maximum impact on the 2024 presidential election. That kind of voluntary timing strategy by a prosecutor should count for zero in the analysis of whether to grant certiorari before judgment."