The federal judge overseeing Donald Trump’s prosecution on charges of retaining classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago club on Tuesday formally scrapped her scheduled 20 May trial date without setting a new date, ruling the case was nowhere near ready to take before a jury in Florida.
The fact that the original May trial date would not hold was a foregone conclusion and has been apparent since last year, given delays with pre-trial litigation and the number of unresolved legal issues that have only increased in recent months.
The presiding US district court judge Aileen Cannon set several new deadlines in a five-page order scrapping the trial date, seemingly in an effort to get the case back on track, but the drawn-out nature of the dates cast doubt on the likelihood of a trial before the 2024 election.
In doing so, the judge played into Trump’s overarching legal strategy to seek indefinite delays for his criminal cases, under the belief that winning re-election would enable him to appoint a loyalist as attorney general who could direct prosecutors to drop the charges.
The only silver lining for the special counsel Jack Smith, who brought the case, is that the federal judge overseeing Trump’s criminal case in Washington DC on charges that he conspired to overturn the 2020 election results is free, for now, to schedule that case for trial in the summer.
But the possibility of that case proceeding to trial before the election is also in doubt, since a trial date cannot be set until the US supreme court rules on Trump’s presidential immunity claim and even then, Trump has roughly three more months of defense preparation time left on the clock.
Trump’s success in delaying his two federal criminal cases with pre-trial motions, and playing them off each other, means the New York criminal trial currently under way on charges he falsified business records may be the only case to go to trial before the 2024 election in November.
As part of her order, Cannon issued a series of deadlines for only a handful of unresolved pre-trial motions that sketched out a timetable into late July. The drawn-out timeline suggests the case is now running more than six months behind a schedule that envisioned the 20 May trial date.
Cannon, appointed by Trump in the waning days of his presidency, has generally given wide deference to Trump and his legal team, granting nearly all extensions they have requested and entertaining his most brazen defense theories, even if they have been without precedent in Espionage Act cases.
In an unusual move, Cannon allowed Trump to have a hearing about potentially dismissing the case based on accusations from Trump that the special counsel’s office was illegally set up, and to have a two-day hearing about who should be included as being part of the prosecution team.
Trump filed a motion in January asking Cannon to formally recognize almost all of the US intelligence community and agencies to be considered part of the prosecution team, in a move that would inject months more delay into the process because it could entitle Trump to voluminous discovery.
And in a notable delay, Cannon pushed back the deadline for Trump to give his notice – under section 5 of the Classified Information Procedures Act (Cipa), which governs how Espionage Act cases proceed to trial – about what classified documents he intended to introduce as evidence for the defense.
Section 5 is considered the most important part of Cipa, which was enacted to protect the US government from the practice of “graymail”, where defendants threatened to disclose classified information into the public domain at trial, hoping prosecutors would prefer to drop the case.
The process would involve Trump disclosing which classified documents found at Mar-a-Lago he wanted to use as part of a defense argument. But defendants, trying to keep their trial defenses secret, often provide too vague of a notice – which prosecutors then have to challenge in an appeals court.
Trump’s legal team told Cannon in recent weeks that they wanted their deadline to provide the section 5 notice delayed until mid-June, until after they were done defending Trump in New York. Cannon obliged, moving the deadline to 17 June.
