OAN’s Daniel Baldwin
12:06 PM –Thursday, August 31, 2023
Former President Donald Trump has formally moved to sever his Georgia legal case from co-defendants seeking a speedy trial, arguing it would violate his right to a fair trial.
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“It is perfectly reasonable for some defendants to want a speedy trial,” Jesse Binnall, a constitutional attorney, told One America News. “There’s statutory and constitutional rights that protect that. But it is also very, very reasonable in a case like this where you’re looking at the possibility of millions and millions of documents that have to be reviewed to not want to be railroaded.”
Steve Sadow, Trump’s attorney in the case, argued that an Oct. 23, 2023 trial date scheduled for co-defendant Kenneth Chesebro, who has invoked his right to a speedy trial, would be unfair to the 45th president.
“Undersigned lead counsel will not have sufficient time to prepare President Trump’s case for trial by the October 23, 2023 scheduled trial date of co-defendant Chesebro, who has demanded a speedy trial,” Sadow wrote in a court filing.
“[Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis] knows that Donald Trump wins any fair trial that’s put before any court,” Binnall said. “And so a fair trial is her enemy. It is what she does not want. She wants a railroad job.”
“And so that’s why she would love the opportunity to try to get this case tried in October, because, at that point, there’s no way to review the millions and millions of pages of documents that are likely to be at issue in this case,” Binnall continued.
Trump pleaded not guilty to the charges in the Georgia case and will now avoid having to appear at a scheduled arraignment hearing on Sept. 6.
Trump’s latest court filing continues to amplify pre-trial legal battles that will likely continue to dominate and highlight the difficulty of trying 19 co-defendants at once.
“I think these cases will probably be severed,” Binnall told OAN. “And on top of that, truth be told, I think it’s very, very likely that these cases are gonna be removed to the federal court.”
If Trump succeeds in severing his case, Binnall explained it will have the desired effect of slowing down proceedings for the 45th president.
“If he severed from the defendants that want the speedy trial, then that’s not going to speed things up,” Binnall said. “I think that is something that is going to make this case proceed at the reasonable pace that you would expect of a case that involves millions and millions of documents and extraordinarily important constitutional issues that are going to have to be litigated before trial.”
Binnall says any reasonable judge would do everything he/she could to ensure that both sides have ample amount of time to prepare before going to trial.
“Something that the judges always ask parties in a criminal trial before they’re ready to start is, ‘Is the prosecution ready to proceed and is the defendant ready to proceed,’” Binnall explained. “And if you try to railroad someone, then I expect a defense attorney would stand up and say, ‘No, your Honor, we have told the court that we need more time. We have not been able to review documents to find out if there’s evidence that’s been presented to the court or that presented to us in discovery that exonerates our client, something that we call Brady evidence. We haven’t been able to fully be able to synthesize the information that’s given to us to properly put together our case. We’re not ready to proceed.’ And that’s an important Sixth Amendment issue to the United States Constitution.”
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