Judge determines timing of trial against secret documents against Trump

A federal judge in Florida will hold a hearing Friday to choose a new date for former President Donald J. Trump’s trial on charges of mishandling classified documents, a move likely to have major consequences for his legal and political future.

The judge, Aileen M. Cannon, has already said she is inclined to make some “reasonable adjustments” to the timing of the trial, which is tentatively scheduled to begin May 20 in Federal District Court in Fort Pierce. , Fla. Several decisions Judge Cannon has made in recent months about the pace of the case have made it virtually impossible for the trial to begin as planned.

What remains to be seen is how long the delay Judge Cannon ultimately imposes will be.

On Thursday evening, Trump’s lawyers and prosecutors in the office of special counsel Jack Smith sent Judge Cannon their proposals on when the trial should begin.

Mr. Smith’s legal team, adhering to its long-held position for the trial to take place before Election Day, requested a date of July 8. But after months of trying to postpone the trial until next year, Mr. Trump’s lawyers suddenly backtracked. and suggested a date of August 12.

The hearing for Judge Cannon, who was appointed to the bench by Mr. Trump in his final days as president, comes just days after a Supreme Court decision that raises the possibility that the former president may not face trial sooner. Election Day in his other federal case — the one in which he is accused of plotting to overturn the 2020 election.

The justices agreed to decide whether Mr. Trump is immune from prosecution on the election interference charges, with oral arguments scheduled for late April and the court proceedings remaining frozen until the issue is resolved. In practice, the Supreme Court’s decision to hear the case meant that the election process was unlikely to begin before September, in the heat of the general election campaign.

Judge Cannon’s decision on whether to use a July date, an August date or a little later in the documents case could also have an effect on the timing of the election case. Mr. Trump is expected to attend the hearing on Friday.

It was not clear why Mr Trump’s legal team said it would remain open until August, after long trying to delay the trial until next year. But one possibility was that by proposing to spend much of the late summer and early fall in court on the classified documents case, the lawyers were trying to reduce the chance that there would be time to resolve the election case before the to bring election day to court.

Just months ago, it appeared Trump would spend much of 2024 before a jury, fending off four separate criminal charges in four different cities.

However, at this time only one of his criminal trials has a solid start date. Last month, a state judge in Manhattan selected March 25 to begin his trial on charges of arranging hush money payments to a porn star in an effort to prevent a scandal on the eve of the 2016 election.

Trump’s fourth criminal case, accusing him of tampering with the election results in Georgia, has not yet gone to trial. The situation is currently in turmoil as a Fulton County judge considers disqualifying Fani T. Willis, the prosecutor who filed the charges, from the case over allegations of financial misconduct surrounding a romantic relationship she had with one of her deputies.

The Florida hearing, which will last most of Friday, won’t just be about scheduling issues.

Judge Cannon has asked the defense and prosecution to be prepared to discuss Trump’s unusually broad and highly politicized motion for additional discovery, filed in January. In the motion, the former president’s lawyers suggested that, as part of their defense at trial, they planned to argue that federal officials — including especially those in the intelligence community — were “politically motivated and biased” against Mr. Trump.

The sides will also debate an attempt by Mr. Smith to keep secret the names of about 20 potential witnesses who could testify at the trial.

Judge Cannon briefly granted a request from Mr. Trump’s lawyers to include the names of the witnesses in a public trial. But she suspended that decision after Mr Smith accused her of making a “clear mistake” and said the witnesses could face threats or intimidation if their identities were revealed.

Even during the discussion of these other issues, the issue of the timing of the trial was arguably of paramount importance.

If Judge Cannon were to postpone the proceedings until next year, she would likely face a groundswell of criticism. It is possible she could also trigger Mr Smith’s first appeal since the suit was filed in June, even though rulings on planning issues are generally not open to challenge in higher courts.

When Judge Cannon was randomly assigned to the case last spring, she was already under fire for making a ruling early in the investigation that was favorable to Mr. Trump but so legally questionable that an appeals court severely reprimanded her when she reversed the case. It.

After the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s private club and residence in Florida, for classified documents in August 2022, Judge Cannon appointed an independent arbitrator to determine whether the material collected by the agents was privileged and could must be. kept out of the hands of researchers.

But she accompanied that relatively typical decision with another that was virtually unheard of, effectively freezing the government’s investigation into Mr. Trump until after the arbitrator, known as a special master, had completed his work.

Prosecutors were outraged by the move, accusing Judge Cannon not only of not having the power to intervene so extremely in the case, but also of treating Mr. Trump differently than a normal criminal defendant.

A federal appeals court in Atlanta ultimately agreed, unanimously reversing her decision and noting that she appeared to have granted “a special exception” for Mr. Trump, despite “our nation’s fundamental principle that our law applies to everyone.”

Yet Judge Cannon has shown herself willing to thwart Mr. Trump in some of her more recent rulings.

On Wednesday, for example, she denied a highly unusual request from his lawyers to access a secret government file detailing a trove of classified evidence that prosecutors said was neither useful nor relevant to his defense.

Had Judge Cannon granted the request, legal experts said, it would have fallen far outside the normal procedures laid out in the Classified Procedures Act, the federal law that governs the use of classified materials during public trials.

But even as he ruled against Trump, Judge Cannon seemed to suggest he was different from most criminal defendants. She did not fully agree with Mr. Smith’s position that the facts in this case “did not remotely justify a departure from the normal process.”

“The court,” she wrote, “cannot speak with such confidence about this first-ever criminal prosecution of a former president of the United States — once the nation’s leading classification authority on many of the documents the special counsel is now trying to get him to withhold.’