11 prominent Republicans file amicus brief that ‘flies in the face’ of Trump’s trial delay demands

Eleven prominent Republicans, including “Republican-appointed former judges and high-ranking federal senior legal officials,” on Monday submitted an amicus brief in support of special counsel Jack Smith’s proposed trial date in the case of former President Donald Trump’s alleged election interference, CNN reports.

Trump’s lawyers this week are expected to suggest their own timetable for the case against the former president on charges of conspiring to overturn the 2020 presidential election results after prosecutors argued in a motion Friday that “the rapid pace was needed given the gravity and historic nature of the charges,” the New York Times reports. Smith’s team, in that motion, proposed a Jan. 2, 2024 trial date, and also said they were “poised to give Trump’s lawyers the bulk of their discovery evidence in the next two weeks or so,” according to the Times.

Presiding judge Tanya S. Chutkan on Friday entered a protective order “laying out restrictions on how Trump's team can handle hundreds of thousands of pages of discovery that will be turned over and verbally warned Trump's lawyers about statements about the case,” NBC News reports. Chutkan will oversee the election interference case in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, and will ultimately decide if the amicus brief authored by 11 Republican legal minds can be included in the official court record.

“There is no more important issue facing America and the American people – and to the very functioning of democracy – than whether the former president is guilty of criminally undermining America’s elections and American democracy in order to remain in power notwithstanding that the American people had voted to confer their power upon the former president’s successor, President Joseph Biden,” the amicus brief authors wrote.

“Nothing less is at stake than the American experiment in democracy and democratic government that began with our nation’s founding almost two hundred and fifty years ago,” they added.

According to CNN reporters Jamie Rangel and Jack Forrest, "the Republican credentials of [the amicus brief] authors fly in the face of the former president’s repeated argument that his trial’s timeline is a partisan exercise against him.”

In the brief, the 11 Republicans — including former U.S. attorney general Alberto Gonzales, co-founder of Federalist Society Steven Calabresi and former 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals judge J. Michael Luttig — insist Smith’s proposed date “respects and serves the former president’s own interest in a speedy trial.”

“The former president is entitled to this speedy trial as a matter of law,” the authors argued. “He is not entitled to an unjust delay in his trial to serve his purely personal and political interests in the delay of his trial.”

Read the full report at CNN.