Judge in Trump Documents case draws attention to slow pace

Two and a half weeks after holding a hearing to choose a trial date in the classified documents case against former President Donald J. Trump, Judge Aileen M. Cannon still has not decided when the proceedings will begin.

Part of the problem is the case itself, which is inherently complex.

But Judge Cannon, who has only been on the bench for four years, has done herself no favors by allowing a logjam of unresolved issues to pile onto her docket. That pile-up appears to have kept her from reaching a quick decision on the timing of the case, even though the defense and prosecution have told her they believe the trial could begin this summer.

While the lack of a trial date may be the most important issue before her, it is one of many things Judge Cannon has done, or not done, that have raised concerns about her decision-making.

On Monday evening, for example, she issued a curious order asking Trump’s lawyers and prosecutors in the office of special counsel Jack Smith to send her dueling jury instructions on two of the former president’s defenses in the case. She had already rejected one and apparently dismissed the other during a hearing last week.

Her interest in jury issues was somewhat strange because it came before she had decided when the trial would begin. But it was doubly unusual because it appeared to embrace one of Trump’s boldest defenses, leaving open the possibility that she could let the charges go to trial and then acquit the former president near the end of the proceedings by declaring that the government had failed to prove its case.

Even a seasoned lawyer could have difficulty laying out the timeline for a case that requires complicated litigation over how to handle the classified material with which Mr. Trump is accused. It would also be a challenge for any judge to fit that schedule around his busy campaign calendar and his obligations to attend proceedings in his three other criminal cases.

Still, some legal experts said the slow pace of Judge Cannon’s decision-making and the confusion that accompanied her conduct of the proceedings were indications of Judge Cannon’s inexperience and the ways in which Mr. Trump’s lawyers have been able to take advantage of it.

Judge Cannon, 43, was nominated to federal court by Mr. Trump in the final months of his term. Previously, she had been a federal prosecutor, where she mainly handled appeals. When she was assigned to oversee the secret documents case last year, she had handled only four criminal cases that had gone to trial.

“Based on what we know of her professional biography, this judge is completely inexperienced with complex criminal cases, and this is a case where complexity is inherent because of the national security aspects,” said Samuel Buell, a former federal prosecutor and defense attorney. professor at Duke University.

“Then you have sophisticated lawyers who are more than capable of multiplying that complexity,” he said, adding that they could do so “knowing that at some point she will essentially drink through a fire hose.”

Of course, it’s impossible to know what Judge Cannon might be thinking in the privacy of her chambers in Federal District Court in Fort Pierce, Florida. But the backlog of issues on her plate in the Trump case, while confusing to follow, can at least be glimpsed on the public record.

It is likely that before she decides on the trial schedule, Judge Cannon will await ruling on another motion filed by Mr. Trump: his unusual request for additional discovery materials in which he sought to blame the intelligence community for trapping him.

It would make sense to rule on this motion first, as Trump’s lawyers have asked Judge Cannon as part of it for an expanded hearing on whether the country’s spies and other national security officials were part of the team that killed him continued. If the judge is inclined to grant the hearing, it would take some time and have a clear impact on the overall outcome of the case.

But before ruling on the discovery request, she appears to be waiting for a decision on a supplemental motion: one related to Mr. Trump’s unusual attempt to file an unredacted version of the discovery papers that names of almost twenty government leaders would be revealed. to give evidence.

Prosecutors asked Judge Cannon to keep the names secret because they feared that if they were made public, the witnesses could be subject to threats or intimidation. But even though prosecutors filed their appeal more than a month ago, Judge Cannon has not yet addressed it.

As if this tangled web of unresolved issues and delays wasn’t enough, Mr. Trump’s lawyers filed a new request for additional time last week.

The attorneys asked Judge Cannon for an additional ten days to file paperwork related to their many attempts to have the case dismissed. One of the reasons they cited for needing a delay was that the judge had not yet ruled on their discovery request – one of the cases in the impasse.

So far, Mr. Smith has not complained too loudly about this. But at a hearing in Fort Pierce in early March, one of his top deputies, Jay I. Bratt, asked Judge Cannon to speed things up a bit in an effort, as he gently put it, “to keep this case moving.”

The judge appeared to respond to Mr. Bratt’s request.

“I can assure you,” she replied, “there is a lot of legal work going on in the background.”

Some legal experts, however, have questioned that work, pointing not only to the judge’s failure to set a trial date but also to her more recent ruling on jury instructions.

In that order, Judge Cannon asked the defense and prosecution to help her tighten for the jury the definition of a key phrase in the Espionage Act — the central statute in Trump’s indictment — that makes it a crime to take “unauthorized possession.” to have certain sensitive government documents.

Mr. Trump has argued for months that he had full authority to have the documents removed from the White House removed because under another law, the Presidential Records Act, he had converted the materials in question from official documents to personal documents.

But at a hearing in Fort Pierce last week, Judge Cannon seemed skeptical of that argument, saying it would “undermine” the Presidential Records Act. The law was introduced after the Watergate scandal not to allow presidents to make unfettered claims on documents from their time in office, but for the opposite reason: to ensure that most documents remained in the government’s possession.

Still, despite her initial misgivings about Trump’s claims that he had made the documents his own personal property, Judge Cannon seemed to entertain the idea again in her order on jury instructions.

One of the scenarios she asked the defense and prosecution to consider was whether “a president under the PRA has exclusive authority to categorize documents as personal or presidential during his/her presidency.”

Margaret Kwoka, a law professor at Ohio State University, said Judge Cannon’s order was unusual because she appeared to be asking the two sides to give her different jury instructions for different interpretations of the law rather than deciding the law themselves and then to ask for instructions. for the jury.

“The strange thing about this order is that it seems to be throwing things off,” Professor Kwoka said. “This is such a strange way to approach this problem.”

Eileen Sullivan reporting contributed.