NBC Reporter on ‘Aggressive’ Trump Trial Date: Lawyers ‘Didn’t Help Themselves’ With ‘Bombastic’ Court Behavior

NBC News’ Ken Dilanian reported that former President Donald Trump’s lawyers did their client no favors in court on Monday during an appearance on MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell Reports.

U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan set a trial start date of March 4, 2024 for the federal charges against Trump for his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. That’s just one day before many GOP primary voters will go to the polls on Super Tuesday, and over two years before Trump’s legal team’s requested date in April 2026.

Dilanian called the selection of the date “more aggressive than many people believed.”

He continued:

I was thinking maybe June, maybe in the summer. It’s really only two months distant from what the special counsel had proposed, which was January of 2024, and the judge said that that was too aggressive, but she really didn’t give the Trump team much of anything, and they didn’t help themselves at this hearing with some rather bombastic comments about the enormity of the case.

She told them right away look, April 2026 was not happening. It was not reasonable in her view, it was way too far from the actual point of the alleged crimes, witnesses could lose their memories, it just wasn’t feasible. So she said give me a reasonable timeframe that you need to process all the discovery in this case and they just wouldn’t do it. They wouldn’t get off the April 2026 date that they were proposing. It’s pretty clear that they wanted to make a record so that they could appeal this question down the line. But the judges said that it’s in the interest of justice and it’s in the public interest to get this case to trial.

Trump has repeatedly reshuffled his legal team as he deals with the fallout of four separate criminal indictments this year.

Watch above via MSNBC.

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