Former President Donald Trump gave a glimpse into how he expects his trial in Georgia to go when it begins during an interview with a conservative radio host on Wednesday.
Radio talker Hugh Hewitt talked with Trump about the pending trial and the charges, which the former president described as “election interference.”
“Will you testify in your own defense?” Hewitt asked. Trump quickly replied, “Oh, yes, absolutely.”
“You’ll take the stand?” Hewitt asked Trump to clarify.
“That I would do. That I look forward to, because that’s just like Russia, Russia, Russia. … I look forward to testifying. At trial, I’ll testify,” he said.
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis wants to try Trump and the other 18 defendants she has charged in connection with post-2020 election activities next month, but legal experts think there’s no way that will happen.
Willis asked for Trump’s trial to begin in October, as the GOP primary is ongoing and heating up. But CNN’s Elie Honig said there’s no chance of that happening.
“There is no planet on which this case will be tried in the next few months, due to the logjam that we just saw. Now we see all of these four different indictments, and they’re all jockeying for very limited trial space, but the D.A. has asked to try this in March,” he said. “First of all, there is an ongoing racketeering trial right now that the D.A.’s office is handling in Georgia. They are still choosing a jury, they’re seven months in. I know that sounds unbelievable, but state jury selection is way slower than in federal cases,” Honig told CNN host Anderson Cooper.
“So, even if they start in March, they’d still be picking a jury on election day, so that is not happening. I understand what the D.A. is doing, she’s doing what prosecutors are trained to do. You always say, ‘We are ready to go, any day; we want to try everyone all together,’ but March is not happening for this case,” Honig added.
Earlier this week, DA Willis pushed for a “speedy trial” of all 19 co-defendants in a case she filed against Trump.
Willis made an astonishing request to the court, requesting that all defendants be tried starting on October 23, according to a report. Only two of the co-defendants have been identified thus far: former Trump attorney Sydney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro.
However, Willis argued in a court filing on Tuesday that separating the defendants would be “improper.”
In a stunning request to the court, Willis said she wanted to try all defendants beginning Oct. 23.
MSNBC host Ali Velshi asked network legal analyst Glenn Kirshner, “What is the basis of arguing that severance in a case like this is improper?”
“So, Ali, anytime we indict a co-defendant case, the prosecutors have a keen interest in keeping all defendants in the same trial,” Kirschner said. “The defendants ordinarily have a keen interest to try to get themselves removed from, or severed out, of the joint trial. Why is that? Because any time co-defendants are tried separate from their fellow co-defendants — and I’ve had this happen many times as a prosecutor — they will make what they call ‘the empty chair defense.’”
“So I can almost promise you that one of, for example, defendant Chesebro’s defenses, if he is sitting there, either alone or maybe with Sidney Powell and one or two other co-conspirators, charged co-defendants, I can almost see him saying, ‘You know what? John Eastman, the constitutional scholar, the law school Dean, who should be sitting in that empty chair right there, but he’s not,” Kirshner continued.
“He is the true architect behind the alternate electors scheme because he assured me there was legal support for it,’” Kirshner added.