CNN’s Elie Honig called out Judge Tanya Chutkan on Thursday for “hypocrisy” after telling former President Donald Trump’s team that the upcoming election was not taken into consideration when deciding a trial date.
Judge Chutkan held her first hearing Thursday regarding special counsel Jack Smith’s election interference case against Trump, and later released a pretrial schedule setting the last motion deadline for Nov. 7. Prior to the schedule release, Honig said on “The Lead With Jake Tapper” that while the judge had claimed not to consider the election date, she had previously been “aligned” with Smith on pushing the case to be “tried before the election.”
“It was interesting to hear today — to hear Judge Chutkan say to Donald Trump’s team, ‘We don’t think about the election date at all.’ Now that’s the textbook thing to say, but let’s be real, there’s some hypocrisy here. Because in the early days of this case, Judge Chutkan was very much aligned with Jack Smith in a mad rush to get this case tried before the election,” Honig said.
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“The original trial date was seven months after the indictment. That’s outrageous. You can’t try a case with 13 million documents, seven months after the indictment. No case would normally get to trial that fast,” Honig said. “So Judge Chutkan and Jack Smith were clearly very much thinking about the trial date, the election date, when they wanted to get the trial in before the election. But now that the tables have turned because of the Supreme Court’s decision, all of a sudden from Judge Chutkan it’s, ‘Oh we don’t think about such things.’ I take that with some grain of salt.”
Smith’s case against Trump had been paused in December.
Chutkan ordered prosecutors to file its first brief on presidential immunity by Sept. 26, with Trump’s team ordered to file their first response by Oct. 17. The judge additional ordered files to be set throughout October.
During the hearing, prosecutors argued their stance on why they believe their new indictment complies with the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling, while Trump’s legal team pushed back, requesting a longer schedule, according to CNN. Chutkan had told the court at the time that she was “not concerned with the electoral schedule.”
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