More than 18 months ago, as Donald Trump sought to delay several high-profile witnesses’ testimony to a grand jury investigating his effort to subvert the 2020 election, Washington, D.C’s top federal district judge sensed a potential calamity. “The special counsel’s investigation is moving quickly. There is an imperative that it moves quickly particularly so as not to interfere with the 2024 election cycle,” Chief Judge James Boasberg said on April 3, 2023, according to an unsealed transcript of the secret proceeding. “So when the former President’s pleading says that there will be a nominal impact from a delay, I think that is a vast understatement, that there would be a serious and deleterious impact from a delay.”
Boasberg’s warning in the early stages of special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation now rings prescient. A series of delays engineered by Trump, notably an eight-month freeze while the Supreme Court considered his claim to be immune from the charges altogether, have caused the criminal proceedings to collide with the 2024 election cycle and made it impossible for Trump to stand trial on the most serious charges he faces before Election Day. Trump has accused the Biden administration of seeking to hobble him politically. A different story emerges in the unsealed court documents, which became public Monday evening after a two-year legal effort initiated by POLITICO. The documents show that judges repeatedly warned Trump against unnecessarily delaying his federal election case, both because of the intense public interest in seeing the case resolved and also, to avoid the pitfalls of the case dragging deep into 2024. Boasberg’s predecessor as chief judge, Beryl Howell, decried Trump's "delay tactics' and an "obvious pattern of delay."
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