John Eastman asked the judge overseeing former President Donald Trump’s Georgia 2020 election case on Monday to allow Trump to be tried apart from his co-defendants.
Eastman opposed a motion Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis filed earlier in November requesting an August 5, 2024, trial start date and June 21, 2024, final plea date. His filing calls the June date “arbitrary and capricious,” asking Judge Scott McAfee to schedule it earlier in 2024.
“The ‘final plea date’ should be established earlier in 2024 so that defendants who do not have lifetime United States Secret Service protection and who are not running for election to an office can exercise and have their right to a jury trial completed within 2024,” the filing states.
Eastman also asked to break the remaining defendants into two groups “absent former President Trump.”
“Establishing a ‘Final Plea date’ earlier in 2024 and severing the Defendants into two groups would provide more than enough time for the Court to try two trials each of eight [or] fewer defendants, absent former president Trump who at the present may be said to be the presumptive Republican nominee for the office of President of the United States,” Eastman’s lawyer wrote. “Without Defendant Trump in the courtroom the U.S. Secret Service will not be involved in providing enhanced security, and the trials will proceed faster.”
Eastman, charged with nine counts, including violating Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced And Corrupt Organizations Act, was among 19 co-defendants indicted August 14. Four defendants — Scott Hall, Kenneth Chesebro, Sidney Powell and Jenna Ellis — have since accepted plea deals.
Willis wrote in her Nov. 17 motion that any trial will “share the same evidence and witnesses.” “In a case where the same witnesses, the same evidence, and the same charges would be used against all defendants—thus affecting judicial economy in the use of physical facilities and the time of witnesses, jurors, and court personnel—the trial court must consider these efficiencies against the possible conflicting interests of joint or multiple defendants,” she wrote.
Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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