Reacting to a request from Donald Trump's legal team to postpone his Florida trial to 2026 due to the massive amount of time that will be required to go through millions of documents obtained during discovery, former prosecutor Joyce Vance dismissed the idea of the motion out of hand.
As CNN reported: "In a filing Thursday evening, Trump urged US District Judge Tanya Chutkan in Washington, DC, to reject Smith’s proposal for a January 2024 trial, saying he 'seeks a trial calendar more rapid than most no-document misdemeanors, requesting just four months from the beginning of discovery to jury selection." Instead, Trump's team suggested a trial date that's years away.
Appearing on MSNBC with host Andrea Mitchell, Vance claimed there was nothing preventing the former president from hiring more lawyers to deal with the task at hand.
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"Does the Trump legal team have to go through every page of a document?" the MSNBC host pressed. "They said it was like reading 'War and Peace' 78 times a day. Since this is all digital, aren't there lawyers in a lot of big cases who can just speed through this process using word searches? Is that not fair?"
"Exactly," Vance shot back. "An entire industry has grown up around discovery in criminal cases."
"You don't have to read 'War and Peace' 78 times a day, you simply search for 'Natasha' and find every page where she's mentioned," she joked.
"A lot of this material will be the same; there will be emails and stuff like that," she continued. "I think it's misleading to use this sort of an analogy. Trump is a wealthy man, he has the ability to hire teams of lawyers. He has the ability to hire experts who do this sort of computer search that will focus their endeavors and their efforts in a way that's more streamlined than the argument they try to make in this brief."
Watch below or at the link.
MSNBC 08 18 2023 12 13 24youtu.be
