What’s Next in the Trump Election Case? Setting a Pretrial Timetable

The election case against former President Donald J. Trump will now move to the pretrial phase before Judge Tanya S. Chutkan after he pleaded not guilty on Thursday.

The government has been asked to file a brief by Aug. 10 proposing a trial date and an estimate of how long it believes its part of the trial will take. Mr. Trump’s defense team will have to file a brief addressing those details by Aug. 17.

The first hearing before Judge Chutkan to discuss such matters will be at 10 a.m. on Aug. 28, a magistrate judge, Judge Moxila A. Upadhyaya, said.

If the classified documents case is any guide, prosecutors are likely to argue for a speedy trial while Mr. Trump’s defense team urges Judge Chutkan to put the matter off until after the 2024 election. (If Mr. Trump or an ally wins the presidency, he or she could direct the Justice Department to drop the case, but the defense argument will be that they need a lot of time to go through the evidence and carry out their own inquiry.)

In parallel with those filings, it is likely the government will ask Judge Chutkan to issue a protective order restricting how the defense team can handle evidence turned over in discovery, in which prosecutors are required to provide the defense with relevant evidence that investigators have gathered.

Once the judge does so — a standard step — a prosecutor, Thomas P. Windom, told Judge Upadhyaya that the government is prepared to immediately turn over a large amount of material.

Discovery is often the subject of disputes, in which the defense argues that the judge should order the government to make more information available than it wants to.

The defense is also likely to file a variety of motions asking Judge Chutkan to exclude certain evidence from any trial or to throw out one or more charges in the case.

Earlier in the investigation, for example, Mr. Trump’s lawyers had tried to block the grand jury from obtaining certain documents and hearing certain testimony on the grounds that they were covered by attorney-client or executive privilege. They largely lost those fights, but will have the opportunity to object to allowing the information to be used at trial.