Fulton County, Ga. District Attorney Fani Willis, who is leading the sprawling racketeering case against Donald Trump and 14 co-defendants in Georgia, said Tuesday that she expects the trial to conclude by early 2025 with proceedings likely to be underway during the final stretch of the 2024 presidential election, The Washington Post reports. “I believe in that case there will be a trial. I believe the trial will take many months. And I don’t expect that we will conclude until the winter or the very early part of 2025,” Willis said during The Washington Post Live's Global Women's Summit.
A spokesman for Rudy Giuliani, who is a defendant in the case, said Willis' prediction proves the case is politically motivated to interfere with Trump's re-election bid. Though she declined to comment on Trump or his co-defendants specifically, she said the election cycle has no bearing on her offices' decisions on case timelines. “That does not go into the calculus. What goes into the calculus is: This is the law. These are the facts. And the facts show you violated the law. Then charges are brought,” she said.
Legal experts voiced concern over Willis' projected schedule. "This trial should be much more ready to go than it is and these delays, I think, are unconscionable and wrong. And I think if this happens and a trial takes place in 2025, if on the off chance Donald Trump wins, he's going to have a serious constitutional argument that a state prosecutor can't interfere with the nation's business and lock up the president of the United States," former acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal said on MSNBC Tuesday, describing Willis' comments as "disappointing." A 2025 trial conclusion could also "throw a potential wrench into efforts by Cannon to push off the MAL docs case," national security lawyer Bradley Moss tweeted, referring to Trump's Florida federal criminal case. "She either will need to have that done before Fall 2024 or push it off until after Georgia finishes."
