More than 18 months ago, as Donald Trump tried to delay the testimony of several key witnesses before a grand jury investigating his effort to undermine the 2020 election, a federal district judge in Washington sensed potential calamity.

“The special counsel’s investigation is moving quickly. It is imperative that they move quickly, especially so as not to interfere with the 2024 election cycle,” said Chief Justice James Boasberg. he said on April 3, 2023, according to a newly unsealed transcript of the secret procedure. “So when the former president’s plea says there would be a nominal impact from a delay, I think that’s a vast understatement, that there would be a serious and damaging impact from a delay.”

Boasberg’s warning in the early stages of special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into the former president now sounds prescient. A series of delays created by Trump, notably an eight-month freeze while the Supreme Court deemed his claim immune from charges, have caused the criminal proceedings to clash with the 2024 election cycle — and made it impossible for Trump can be tried on the most serious charges he faces before Election Day.

As his cases lingered into the general election season, Trump accused the Biden administration of trying to stymie him politically.

But a different story emerges in newly unsealed judicial documentsbecame public Monday night after a two-year legal effort initiated by POLITICO. The documents show that the justices repeatedly warned Trump not to unnecessarily delay his federal election case, both because of intense public interest in seeing the case resolved and, in Boasberg’s telling, to avoid pitfalls case to extend into 2024. Boasberg’s predecessor as chief judge, Beryl Howell, who oversaw early aspects of the Trump grand jury investigations, similarly condemned “delay tactics” and a “obvious pattern of delay.”

Ultimately, the judges ordered a parade of senior White House officials to speak to the special counsel’s grand jury in secret — and rejected Trump’s effort to slow the process, sometimes giving Trump less than 48 hours to appeal their decisions. Evidence provided by these witnesses was key to the criminal case Smith filed against Trump in August 2023.

U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who was randomly chosen to preside over the case after Smith accused Trump of a massive scheme to steal a second term, similarly and emphatically rejected Trump’s efforts to to base key programming decisions on the electoral calendar. However, Trump succeeded in thwarting Chutkan’s planned trial date of March 4, 2024.

In 2022, POLITICO Howell asked to reveal aspects of the secret decisions he made that forced senior Trump White House officials — such as two advisers to former Vice President Mike Pence — to testify before a grand jury about conversations they had Trump argued they were protected by executive privilege. Although Howell initially rejected the request, citing the traditional secrecy of the grand jury process, an appeals court ordered Boasberg — who succeeded Howell as chief in March 2023 — to re-examine the matter after Smith revealed some details about the secret battles with Trump.

Although the new public documents remain significantly redacted and do not identify the witnesses Trump fought to keep silent, they line up with contemporary news reports that revealed the identities of those who were eventually forced to testify.

What emerges is a stark portrayal of the former president frantically trying to prevent former top aides from revealing details of their conversations about Trump’s bid to reverse his election defeat. Trump claimed they were “absolutely” protected from disclosure because some of those discussions involved matters of national security, and said the conversations were also confidential because they involved his official duties to ensure the 2020 election is correct and safe.

The documents also show that in each case, prosecutors approached the White House to ask whether President Joe Biden would exercise his own authority to assert executive privilege on Trump’s behalf. In each case, Biden declined, citing the “unique” considerations of the Trump case.

The rulings were not without some victories for Trump. For example, rejecting a bid to block a witness, Howell agreed with Trump that his conversations with top aides about the 2020 election related to his official duties as president.

“The releases implicate the former president’s widespread interest in privacy because they speak to his effort to effectively carry out the duties of his office — in this case, the integrity of a national election and their certification,” Howell wrote in a September 28, 2022, notice regarding Trump’s attempt to block two Pence aides, Marc Short and Greg Jacob, from testifying about certain conversations.

However, Howell rejected Trump’s effort, agreeing that the importance of their testimony to the criminal investigation outweighed Trump’s interest in keeping the discussions confidential.