Donald Trump’s lawyers on Thursday proposed an August trial in the former president’s Florida classified documents case even as they argued the case against him should be delayed until after the election.
Despite arguing to push the trial past November, Trump’s team proposed an August 12 trial to U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, three months before Election Day and just weeks following the Republican National Convention, according to The New York Times.
But the attorneys also used the filing to argue that the law, the Constitution and the Justice Department’s policy manual opposes prosecuting the “presumptive Republican nominee” during his campaign.
It’s unclear why Trump’s lawyers proposed a start date before the election but one possibility is that his lawyers are seeking to prevent Trump’s other federal trial — the D.C. election subversion case — from being held before the vote, according to the Times.
Cannon asked both sides to propose new trial schedules. Special counsel Jack Smith’s team on Thursday proposed a July 8 start date. Cannon, who initially set a May 20 trial that has long been in flux due to delays over classified evidence fights, is expected to set a new trial date after a hearing on Friday.
The Supreme Court’s decision this week to hear arguments on Trump’s immunity claim in the D.C. case has put the spotlight on Cannon’s decision even more.
“A decision by Cannon to push back the Florida case could clog the calendar in late summer, making a 2024 trial in Washington on the federal election charges all but impossible, even if the Supreme Court lifts the freeze in the election case soon after it is argued,” Politico reported.
Kenji Yoshino, a professor at New York University School of Law, was stunned by the filing but predicted Cannon won’t be able to ignore Trump’s focus on the campaign.
"I think in an ideal world, she should not," he told CNN. "I mean, no one is above the law. This is a criminal proceeding. She should just set the dates as it were. But I can't imagine that she, as a human being, she will be able to ignore that. One of the most chilling things that I've seen 25 years of teaching constitutional law is the trial schedule that defense attorneys proposed.
"Just this idea that you have somebody who's saying, here's a pretrial motion, and then here's the Republican National Convention, because it just suggests that this is the very first time in our nation's history that we have an individual who is a frontrunner running for president, who was a former president who's under criminal indictment," he continued. "This has never happened before, this is completely uncharted territory ... it did more than anything else to knock my socks off."
MSNBC legal analyst Lisa Rubin pointed out that Trump’s lawyers are “complying with the letter of Cannon’s order to submit a proposed schedule — but not its spirit.”
Despite the proposed date, Trump’s lawyers argue that “a fair trial cannot be conducted this year in a manner consistent with the Constitution” and further argue that such a trial would violate DOJ policy.
“And then and only then does Trump [grudgingly] say he respects the Court's direction to submit a proposed schedule, but one that must, of course, also take account of the SCOTUS presidential immunity case,” she tweeted. “Put another way, this is a coded invitation to Judge Cannon to schedule absolutely nothing—or in the alternative, a trial date that would effectively block Judge Chutkan from trying the case before her before the election.”
