A Georgia prosecutor asked a judge on Friday to set August 2024 as the start date for Donald Trump’s trial for allegedly conspiring to overturn the 2020 election results in the southern US state.
Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis asked for the trial of the former president and his 14 codefendants to begin on August 5, 2024, three months before the US presidential election.
Willis told Judge Scott McAfee, who will preside over the trial, that she had chosen the August date so as not to interfere with “Defendant Trump’s other criminal trials.”
Willis, in an interview this week with The Washington Post, said she expected the trial would last “many months” and would not conclude “until the winter or the very early part of 2025.”
Trump, the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, and the others are charged with racketeering and other offenses related to their alleged efforts to upend the 2020 election in Georgia.
Four codefendants, including three former Trump campaign lawyers, have pleaded guilty already to lesser charges in deals that spared them any prison time.
Trump has pleaded not guilty to charges of involvement in a criminal conspiracy to change the result in Georgia, where Democrat Joe Biden won by some 12,000 votes.
Others indicted in Georgia include former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, John Eastman, a constitutional lawyer, and Jeffrey Clark, a mid-level Justice Department official.
Trump also faces federal charges for his efforts to subvert the 2020 election and the January 6, 2021 storming of the US Capitol by his supporters. That trial is to begin in Washington in March 2024.
Trump and his two eldest sons, Don Jr and Eric, are currently on trial in New York for business fraud and the former president is to go on trial in Florida in May for alleged mishandling of top secret documents after he left the White House.
