Lawyers for former President Donald J. Trump requested a choose on Thursday to reject the federal government’s proposal to take Mr. Trump to trial in early January on prices of looking for to overturn the 2020 election and to as a substitute push again the continuing till April 2026 — almost a yr and a half after the 2024 election.

The legal professionals stated the extraordinary delay was wanted due to the historic nature of the case and the extraordinary quantity of discovery proof they should type by way of — as a lot as 8.5 terabytes of supplies, totaling over 11.5 million pages, they wrote in a submitting to Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, who’s overseeing the case.

In a little bit of authorized showmanship, Gregory M. Singer, the lawyer who wrote the temporary, included a graph that confirmed how 11.5 million pages of paperwork stacked atop each other would end in a “tower of paper stretching nearly 5,000 feet into the sky.”

That, Mr. Singer identified, was “taller than the Washington Monument, stacked on top of itself eight times, with nearly a million pages to spare.”

“Even assuming we could begin reviewing the documents today, we would need to proceed at a pace of 99,762 pages per day to finish the government’s initial production by its proposed date for jury selection,” Mr. Singer wrote. “That is the entirety of Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace,’ cover to cover, 78 times a day, every day, from now until jury selection.”

Mr. Trump’s aggressive request to postpone the trial in Federal District Court in Washington — a method he has pursued in all the prison circumstances he’s dealing with — adopted an equally formidable proposal made final week by prosecutors within the workplace of the particular counsel, Jack Smith, to get the case in entrance of a jury by the primary week of 2024.

Now that Mr. Trump has been indicted 4 occasions in 4 separate circumstances — most just lately, on Monday in Fulton County, Ga. — prosecutors have began jockeying with each other to find out when the trials shall be held. Complicating issues, Mr. Trump’s marketing campaign schedule is about to choose up considerably this winter and spring with a sequence of major elections simply as he shall be obliged to be in varied courthouses in varied cities as a prison defendant.

The choose within the different federal case that Mr. Trump is dealing with — one by which he stands accused of illegally holding on to dozens of labeled paperwork after he left workplace — has slated the matter to go to trial on May 20 in Federal District Court in Fort Pierce, Fla.

On Wednesday, Fani T. Willis, the Fulton County district lawyer, proposed beginning the sprawling trial of Mr. Trump and 18 others on prices of tampering with Georgia’s state election on March 4.

And that was solely three weeks earlier than the March 25 start date for Mr. Trump’s fourth trial — one that may happen in Manhattan on prices associated to hush cash funds made to a porn star within the weeks earlier than the 2016 election.

If the prosecutors all get their manner — and there’s no assurance they are going to — Mr. Trump may very well be on trial roughly nonstop, with just a few weeks’ hiatus right here and there, from early January by way of maybe mid-June at a time when his marketing campaign advisers will certainly need him out on the path holding rallies and assembly with voters.

Some of the previous president’s advisers have made no secret of the truth that he’s trying to win the subsequent election as a technique to attempt to remedy his authorized issues. If Mr. Trump, who’s the front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, can push the federal trials till after the election and prevail, he may search to pardon himself after taking workplace or have his lawyer basic merely dismiss the matter altogether.

To that finish, his legal professionals have sought varied methods to sluggish prosecutors of their race to get to trial and have tried to delay the proceedings the place they’ll.

Last month, for instance, they requested the choose within the paperwork case, Aileen M. Cannon, to postpone that trial indefinitely, arguing that it mustn’t start till all “substantive motions” within the case had been introduced and determined. At a subsequent hearing, they instructed Judge Cannon that she ought to push again the trial till after the 2024 election as a result of, amongst different causes, Mr. Trump may by no means get a good jury within the maelstrom of news media consideration surrounding the race.

The legal professionals tried that gambit once more on Thursday with Judge Chutkan.

Mr. Singer famous in his submitting that not solely have been the invention supplies expansive, however the case additionally involved several novel aspects that made it, as he put it, “terra incognita.”

“No person in the history of our country has ever been charged with conspiracies related to the Electoral Count Act,” he wrote, referring to the post-Civil War period regulation that governs the counting of electors to the Electoral College.

“No president has ever been charged with a crime for conduct committed while in office,” he continued. “No major party presidential candidate has ever been charged while in the middle of a campaign — and certainly not by a Justice Department serving his opponent.”

Mr. Singer additionally talked about Mr. Trump’s increasingly crowded legal calendar, noting that the federal government’s proposal to go to trial in January “presents numerous conflicts” with what he genially described as “other pending matters.”

As an instance, Mr. Singer identified that the choose within the Florida-based labeled paperwork case has scheduled a pretrial listening to for Dec. 11 — the identical day the particular counsel’s workplace has proposed beginning jury choice within the Washington-based election interference case.

Echoing Mr. Singer’s complaints, Christopher M. Kise, one among Mr. Trump’s legal professionals within the Florida case, alerted Judge Cannon in regards to the conflicting proceedings on Dec. 11 in court docket papers filed on Thursday night time.

Mr. Kise famous that he may “only speculate about the special counsel’s motive for offering dates in the newly indicted case that directly conflict with dates” within the Florida case, however appeared focused on making sure that Judge Cannon was conscious of what was happening.

“The special counsel’s strategy asking for a schedule in the D.C. case that culminates in a proposed trial date of Jan. 2, 2024, is not merely gamesmanship by a partisan Department of Justice,” he wrote. “It is a miscarriage of justice.”