Special counsel Jack Smith responded to Donald Trump's request for a 2026 trial date by accusing him of being overly dramatic about the burden that preparing for the case presents.
Trump's lawyers had complained about the federal case accusing him of attempting to overturn the 2020 election result, claiming that it took the Justice Department two years to investigate the case, so it will take them two years to craft their defense.
Jack Smith and his prosecutors called that absurd.
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"In service of a proposed trial date in 2026, that would deny the public its right to a speedy trial, the defendant cites inapposite statistics and cases, overstates the amount of new and non-duplicative discovery, and exaggerates the challenge of reviewing it effectively," the filing begins.
One of Trump's claims is a statistic that shows how long trials take, but the special counsel explained that the numbers they're citing show the timeline from the charges all the way through the completion of sentencing. It has nothing to do with the time of the actual trial procedures. The stats that Trump is citing also come from the trials during and after the COVID-19 crisis.
"The defendant listed Jan. 6th cases also omit important details and context," the prosecutor's filing says.
"He fails to mention, for instance, that in one case, he cites, disposition was delayed because of, among other reasons, litigation over pre-trial detention, a superseding indictment, and plea negotiations. ... All of the defendant's other cited cases include multiple co-defendants — as many as seventeen. ... The Court should set these inapposite comparisons aside when weighting the individual factors here under the Speedy Trial Act."
As for the burden of "discovery" for Trump, the special counsel explained that so much of the information that they had to fight to obtain, Trump already had access to.
"Approximately three million pages of the discovery — 25 percent of the first production — come from entities associated with the defendant," the filing says. "Hundreds of thousands of other pages came from the National Archives — meaning that the defendant or his representatives reviewed them before the Government received them — or are publicly available, including the defendant's tweets, Truth Social posts, campaign statements, and court papers involving challenges to the 2020 election by the defendant or his allies."
Much of the information that they have collected over the past two years, including any appeals, is already available to Trump, Smith said.
