A federal judge on Tuesday heard opposing arguments for when to set the politically charged trial of former President Donald Trump on a 38-count indictment accusing him of mishandling of classified materials at his Palm Beach estate.
Trump’s lawyers urged U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon to postpone what promises to be a complex and controversial criminal trial involving scores of sensitive government secrets until after the 2024 presidential election. U.S. Justice Department prosecutors argued to start as early as December, saying Trump’s political aspirations aren’t legal grounds for indefinite delay.
Cannon did not make a decision during the two-hour hearing in the Fort Pierce federal courthouse, but said she would make a decision promptly and seemed to signal she was prepared to move forward with the trial before the election.
“I think some deadlines can be established now,” she told Trump’s lawyers.
Cannon, a Trump appointee who joined the federal in 2020, had asked both sides to be prepared to address the trial schedule issue as well as the crucial sharing of documents under the Classified Information Procedures Act at the Tuesday afternoon hearing. A special counsel’s team of prosecutors are pushing for the trial this year and defense attorneys are seeking an indefinite delay because of the huge volume of evidence and a looming election that has Trump the apparent early front-runner candidate for the Republican nomination.
Some legal experts said that it’s understandable why the defense lawyers may need more time to prepare for such a complex trial, but questioned their political motives on an indefinite postponement — possibly beyond the November 2024 election so that, if Trump defeats Democratic incumbent Joe Biden, Trump can close the case or pardon himself.
“I think there are better arguments to make to get a substantial delay, but by injecting political arguments into the mix, they are making a mistake and will cause the judge to react negatively,” said longtime Miami defense attorney Mark Schnapp, who served as a federal prosecutor in South Florida.
Cannon will be under intense scrutiny by partisan critics and legal observers because she ruled favorably for the former president on appointing a special master to review the FBI’s seizure of classified documents from Trump’s home last year. Her decision, which would have delayed the Justice Department’s investigation, was overturned by a GOP-appointed panel of appellate judges in a scathing ruling.
There’s also another curiosity about the historic case built on an unprecedented 38-count indictment: While Trump and his co-defendant Walt Nauta were arraigned in Miami federal court in June and July, respectively, the case was assigned to the West Palm Beach division of the Southern District of Florida, which includes the decade-old Fort Pierce federal coutthouse. Fort Pierce is a mostly working-class coastal community of about 48,000 people and serves as the county seat of St. Lucie County, drawing upon a pool of potential jurors in a region that supported Trump in the last two presidential elections.
Last week, in a new court motion, the defense teams for Trump and Nauta urged Cannon to postpone the government’s proposed trial date of Dec. 11 indefinitely, arguing that the Justice Department’s push to prosecute Trump as soon as possible is “untenable” because of the breadth and complexity of the classified documents case.
The motion was also an effort to seize the narrative, trying to portray the former president’s criminal charges over the handling of classified documents as a politically fraught legal battle between Trump and his successor, Biden, as both pursue another run for the White House in 2024.
Although Trump’s lawyers don’t propose a trial date in their filing, the clear suggestion is to delay any trial for the front-runner for the GOP nomination until after the presidential campaign season next year.
“This extraordinary case presents a serious challenge to both the fact and perception of our American democracy,” Trump’s lawyers Christopher Kise and Todd Blanche wrote in a motion joined by his co-defendant in the case, the former president’s personal aide, Walt Nauta.
“The Court now presides over a prosecution advanced by the administration of a sitting President against his chief political rival, himself a leading candidate for the Presidency of the United States,” they wrote in the motion before U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, who is based in the Fort Pierce courthouse. “Therefore, a measured consideration and timeline that allows for a careful and complete review of the procedures that led to this indictment and the unprecedented legal issues presented herein best serves the interests of the Defendants and the public.”
A delay in trial is the big question
Legal experts who have been following the indictment charging Trump with willfully retaining classified documents at Mar-a-Lago and conspiring to obstruct justice with Nauta predicted after it was returned on June 8 by a Miami federal grand jury that the defense would seek to delay the former president’s trial against the wishes of the Justice Department’s special counsel Jack Smith. His team, in a court reply filed last Thursday, said “there is no basis in law or fact for proceeding in such an indeterminate and open-ended fashion, and the Defendants provide none.”
Experts noted that the key factors on the trial date include not only the unprecedented criminal case against a former president heading into another possible election, but also the fact that Trump is scheduled for another criminal trial next March in New York involving his alleged payment of hush-money payments to a porn actress during the 2016 campaign.
Although it remains unclear how Cannon will decide this critical dispute over the trial date, Cannon has already chosen a government security officer to act as a custodian of the hundreds of classified records that were obtained from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence and club through a subpoena and a search warrant last year. The name of that security officer remains a secret under court seal.
Another crucial issue is where those materials with “top secret,” “secret” and “confidential” markings — about 340 classified documents in total, according to prosecutors — will be stored at the Fort Pierce courthouse or elsewhere in a “sensitive compartmented information facility” for both sides to review them before and during trial. (During his presidency, Trump had a room at his Mar-a-Lago residence designated as a so-called SCIF for him and his top aides to review classified records.)
So far, according to the latest filing by Trump’s lawyers, the special counsel’s team has turned a mountain of evidence: more than 428,300 records totaling 833,450 pages, including 122,650 emails with attachments, 305,670 documents from more than 90 different sources, and 57 terrabytes of compressed raw CCV footage spanning nine months.
Defense lawyers have zeroed on that voluminous discovery, along with the daunting task of reviewing classified materials involving U.S. weapons, defense and nuclear programs, as the main reason for requiring more time to prepare for trial.
Trump’s attorneys indicate that they plan to seek dismissal of the 38-count indictment, which includes 31 counts accusing the former president of deliberately withholding classified materials in violation of the Espionage Act, while challenging the special counsel’s legal basis for the historic case against the former president.
“The intersection between the Presidential Records Act and the various criminal statutes at issue has never been addressed by any court, and in the Defendants’ view, will result in a dismissal of the indictment,” Trump’s lawyers Kise and Blanche argue in the court filing, without providing any rationale.
“Additional significant matters include the classification status of the documents and their purported impact on national security interests, the propriety of utilizing any ‘secret’ evidence in a case of this nature, and the potential inability to select an impartial jury during a national Presidential election,” they write in the filing.
“Moreover, the extensive and voluminous discovery, coupled with the challenges presented by the purportedly classified material that has yet to be produced, will require significant time for review and assimilation.”
