More than 18 months ago, as Donald Trump sought to delay several high-profile witness’ testimony to a grand jury investigating his effort to subvert the 2020 election, Washington’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 a newly 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 of the former president now rings prescient. A series of delays engineered by Trump, most 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.
As his cases have persisted into the general election season, Trump has accused the Biden administration of seeking to hobble him politically.
But a different story emerges in newly 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, in Boasberg’s telling, to avoid the pitfalls of the case dragging deep into 2024. Boasberg’s predecessor as chief judge, Beryl Howell, who oversaw early aspects of the Trump grand jury investigations, similarly decried Trump’s “delay tactics” and an “obvious pattern of delay.”
Ultimately, the judges ordered a parade of top White House officials to speak to the special counsel’s grand jury in secret — and they rejected Trump’s effort to slow-walk the process, sometimes giving Trump less than 48 hours to appeal their decisions. The evidence those witnesses provided formed the crux of the criminal case that Smith filed against Trump in August 2023.