The Justice Department has contested former President Trump’s push for an April 2026 trial date concerning his alleged 2020 election interference.
In a direct rebuttal, the prosecutors stated, “In cases such as this one, the burden of reviewing discovery cannot be measured by page count alone… comparisons such as those are a distraction.” They further elaborated that the essence of the review hinges on factors like “relevance, organization, accessibility, searchability, and reviewability.”
Last week, Trump’s attorneys compared the volume of evidence to various landmarks like the Statue of Liberty. They claimed the magnitude of the documents would require them to sift through “99,762 pages per day to finish the government’s initial production by its proposed date for jury selection.” However, the Department of Justice (DOJ) challenged this analogy, pointing out that much of the evidence was either produced or seen by Trump himself. They emphasized the available tools and software that lawyers conventionally utilize, making the sorting process efficient.
The DOJ highlighted that Trump’s team could leverage the e-discovery vendor they’ve engaged with, whose services include “efficient keyword searching and relevancy tagging by multiple simultaneous users, as well as date filtering, deduplication, and threading.”
This approach, the DOJ suggests, would vastly reduce the purported burden presented by Trump’s attorneys. Concluding their argument, the DOJ reminded that they had initially proposed a January 2 court date, maintaining that a significant portion of the evidence, including public tweets from Trump and transcripts related to the Jan. 6 investigation, have been accessible for some time.