Special Counsel Jack Smith’s response to President Trump’s proposed April 2026 trial date for his January 6 case signals that when it comes to scheduling, the prosecutor is not backing down. 

Mr. Smith’s need for speed was reflected in the mechanics of filing his reply motion, which came just hours after Judge Tanya Chutkan authorized him to do so and a day ahead of the deadline she imposed. That alacrity suggests that the trial’s timing — before rather than after the 2024 presidential election — is far from incidental for the special counsel.  

Rebutting the analogies that Mr. Trump’s team summoned to convey the volume of the material they will be required to work through, Mr. Smith opines that references to the “height of the Washington Monument and the length of a Tolstoy novel are neither helpful nor insightful.” In the latest Penguin edition, “War & Peace” clocks in at 1,296 pages.

In his own filing, Mr. Trump had claimed that the 8.5 terabytes he reckons Mr. Smith has assembled would, if stacked, yield a “tower of paper stretching nearly 5,000 feet into the sky,” the equivalent of replicating the Washington Monument eight times over. That comprises more than 11 and a half million pages.     

Accusing Mr. Trump of maneuvering to “deny the public its right to a speedy trial” — though the Constitution assigns that right to the “accused” — Mr. Smith takes a sledgehammer to Mr. Trump’s reasoning for a delay. He claims it “cites inapposite statistics and cases, overstates the amount of new and non-duplicative discovery, and exaggerates the challenge of reviewing it effectively.” 

Central to Mr. Trump’s argument for a trial to begin in more than two years’ time — Mr. Smith wants it to commence this January — is the need for time to review, by hand, the reams of evidence assembled by prosecutors, page by page. 

In pushing for a tighter window, Mr. Smith offers a glimpse of the bones of his case as well as an argument for the “modern standard practice” of reviewing evidence “electronically rather than manually,” using “tools that courts appropriately expect legal professionals to use.” Mr. Smith also accuses Mr. Trump of citing trial times from the period when courts were largely shuttered by Covid-19.

Unlike his Mar-a-Lago prosecution, the special counsel notes that “this is not a case about classified information.” The government has, though, “received from the United States Secret Service approximately 3.1 million pages of material,” as well as nearly a million pages from the “House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.”

Mr. Smith notes that the “burden of reviewing discovery cannot be measured by page count alone,” and points to how he has “organized and produced materials in a manner designed to ease and expedite the defendant’s review and search.” He adds that many of the materials, including Mr. Trump’s “tweets, Truth Social posts, campaign statements, and court papers involving challenges to the 2020 election,” are publicly available.

In what could be an effort to curry favor with Judge Tanya Chutkan, Mr. Smith notes that his office “took on the task of providing the defense a set of key, organized documents that the Government views as some of the most pertinent to its case-in-chief,” and endeavored to convey material in “an exceptionally organized, clear, and user-friendly fashion.”

While the timing of the January 6 trial now awaits Judge Chutkan’s order, Mr. Smith received encouraging scheduling news on Monday with respect to the Mar-a-Lago documents case being overseen by Judge Aileen Cannon at south Florida. In a “paperless order,” she ruled that the case’s latest criminal defendant, Carlos De Oliveira, is “hereby subject to the deadlines, instructions, and findings” already issued. This suggests that the May trial date remains in place.