Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily's Bob Unruh leaned on right-wing "investigative reporter" Julie Kelly -- who has bizarrely claimed that the Capitol riot "was probably the biggest instance of police brutality that this country has seen since the Civil Rights movement" -- to defend Donald Trump's allegedly overworked attorneys in an Aug. 29 article:
Now Kelly is out with a new report about a hearing before Chutkan, and "it's worse than reported."
[Judge Tanya] Chutkan is trying to run Trump into a trial in record short time, only a few months, and she's now claiming that defense lawyers for Trump "should have begun going through the evidence … against him even before the indictment was handed down," the Post-Millennial reported.
Kelly reported, "Chutkan marveled at [prosecutor} Jack Smith's rapid 'discovery' production while downplaying fact DOJ could not name a single case in DC District that went from indictment to trial in 5 months."
Defense lawyers have proposed a 2026 start date, but prosecutors in the Joe Biden-supervised Department of Justice say they want it much earlier.
That's even though there are tens of millions of pages of evidence to review.
The report explained Chutkan told Trump's lawyer, John Lauro, he didn't need any time past March 4 to review the millions of pages.
She claimed Trump's "lawyers" had seen the material, even if Lauro hadn't.
"For a federal prosecutor to suggest that we could go to trial in four months is not only absurd, it’s a violation of the oath of justice," Lauro said, the New York Times reported.
"We cannot do this in the time frame the government has outlined."
Chutkan charged that defense counsel should have been reviewing documents for a year already.
In fact, Chutkan is not being unreasonable. As a pair of lawyers reported in The Atlantic:
Contemporary trials, civil and criminal, routinely involve the tsunami of data people create day in and day out, resulting in millions of pages of documents produced during discovery. As the government’s reply highlights, Trump’s argument, resting principally on the more than 11.5 million pages of evidence the government produced as an excuse for significant delay, is without merit. Based on our experience in this field, it is simply disingenuous to use 19th- and 20th-century standards for paper cases in the modern era. The chart that Trump’s lawyers produced in their brief—visualizing a tower of physical paper they would have to review in a six-month span—is misleading. We—attorneys both—would be laughed out of court if we suggested delays for our side because a page-by-page document review of all discovery would take three years. Under that approach, no major civil or criminal case would ever be tried for years and years—which may be the Trump team’s actual goal.
Unruh also censored the fact that many of those documents were already available to Trump's lawyers. As USA Today reported, Smith pointed out that "3 million pages of the documents came from Trump entities; a million pages were already publicly available from the House committee that investigated the Capitol attack on Jan. 6, 2021; and hundreds of thousands of other pages came from the National Archives where they were already available. Prosecutors said they loaded electronic records, such as 3 million pages from the Secret Service, in easily searchable form." Additionally, Smith noted that "The Government provided these materials in load-ready files so that the defense can review them quickly in the same manner as the Government did — through targeted keyword searches and electronic sorting," so there's no need to individually review every single page.
In other words, there's no reason that, given that a competent defense team should not have already been reviewing those documents well before indictments were handed down. Then again, few people have accused Trump's legal team of competence.
The fact that Unruh chose to rely on such a wilidly dishonest and biased "investigative reporter" shows how desperate WND is to generate right-wing clickbait, no matter how dubious amd misleading.
