Former acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal said the attempt by Donald Trump’s legal team to move the former president’s election interference trial to April 2026 shows his “consciousness of guilt.”
MSNBC’s Joy Reid on Thursday asked the show’s panelists whether they found the proposed date “laughable” before Katyal chimed in.
“I mean, laughable gives it so much credit, Joy, I mean I don’t actually have adjectives in my vocabulary, at least not ones I can say on television,” Katyal replied.
“I’ve never in my 20-plus years of practicing law seen a request anything like that and I’ll eat my hat if Judge Chutkan accepts it because look, justice delayed is justice denied.”
Katyal’s remarks come as Trump’s attorneys, on Thursday, filed the request for the pushed back start date in what they called an “unprecedented case” with 11.5 million pages of documents.
Special Counsel Jack Smith has eyed a Jan. 2 start date, a move his office described as representing “an appropriately speedy trial in the public interest and in the interests of justice.”
Katyal, who served in the Obama administration, went on the ask what the request tells us of how Trump sees the case’s “merits” before claiming that the former president is “scared” of going to trial.
“If you’re innocent, if you’re you or me and we’re accused of launching a coup and subverting democracy and launching Jan. 6, you’d want this trial right away, you’d want to clear your name but no this guy, this guy’s scared of going to trial,” Katyal said.
“He talks all the bluster he wants outside the courtroom but he is terrified of actually being in the courtroom and when he is in one, he clams up. So to me, this is just further indicia of his own consciousness of guilt. He’s of course entitled to make these filings. There’s no problem with that in terms of legally. But I think that it tells us about his own state of mind.”