A legal expert on Tuesday shot down Donald Trump’s argument that his lawyers need more time to review documents in the Jan. 6 election conspiracy case.
Judge Tanya Chutkan is expected to hold a hearing on Monday in which she’ll hear arguments on the start of the trial. Special counsel Jack Smith has requested that the case go to trial Jan. 2, 2024. Trump’s lawyers are requesting an April 2026 trial.
Former federal prosecutor Andrew Weissman during an appearance on MSNBC’s “Alex Wagner Tonight” called the former president’s lawyers’ request “unserious.”
POLL: Should Trump be allowed to run for office?
“...the ‘11.6 million documents argument’ that stack up as tall as taller than the Washington Monument doesn't seem to be holding a lot of water for special prosecutors,” Wagner said to Weissmann.
Weissman said that before joining the Robert Mueller probe in his role at the Justice Department he was the head of fraud where “we did large white collar corporate cases day in and day out, that it’s bread and butter. Over 100 attorneys doing large corporate cases. So when I hear 11 million documents, I don't think big, I think small.”
“The main reason this is just not an issue in this day and age is we're not in the 19th century or the 20th century. We do not use pieces of paper…. Everything's done by computers,” Weissmann added.
“You do computer searches. You use AI, you then have discovery paralegals. All of this is done in a really fast computer search that's targeted.
“Any federal judge who is dealing with civil and criminal litigation knows that if you come in and say, ‘oh, there's a lot of discovery,’ yes, they want to know that you have time. But to just pretend like it's hard copy paper that goes to the Washington Monument is not a serious argument for the court.”
Watch the video below or at the link here.
MSNBC 08 22 2023 21 34 58www.youtube.com
