Judge denies Trump bid to delay classified documents trial, but extends deadlines for pretrial motions
FORT PIERCE — The federal judge presiding over the U.S. government’s classified documents case against former President Donald Trump has denied — for now — a defense request to delay his criminal trial until after the November 2024 election.
But U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, citing the sheer volume of the documents to be inspected by defense lawyers for Trump and two of his employee co-defendants, agreed to extend a lengthy series of deadlines for pretrial motions. And she agreed to revisit the request to delay the start of the trial, now scheduled for May 20, 2024, at a hearing next March.
Cannon’s decision to keep the trial date intact shows she is not completely convinced a delay is needed, although she appeared to be leaning in that direction at a hearing earlier this month. She had pointed to the other trials Trump faces in the District of Columbia and New York, as well as the volume of classified and unclassified evidence that defense lawyers still need to inspect in the Mar-a-Lago documents case.
Trump is scheduled to appear for trial in Washington on March 4, 2024, on federal charges that he plotted to overturn the 2020 presidential election, which was won by Joe Biden, a Democrat. He also faces state charges in Georgia accusing him of trying to undermine voting results in the presidential election. And he is currently facing civil litigation brought by the New York State attorney general, which alleges that his Trump Organization committed fraud while valuing a wide portfolio of properties for loan and insurance purposes.
In filings and in court, lawyers for special counsel Jack Smith strongly opposed a trial delay in the Florida documents case, pointing out various measures they had taken to make documents available to defense lawyers for review in so-called Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities located at federal courthouses in Miami. Late last month, Trump himself reportedly visited one of those facilities in the company of his lawyers.
Judge still concerned over access
Even though Cannon kept the trial date intact, the judge voiced concern in her nine-page order — which was posted in the court file early Friday — about the volume of the documents that need to be reviewed by the defense.
“The record as it has developed in this case reflects an unusually high volume of unclassified and classified discovery, even as far as CIPA cases go, along with challenges associated with storing and handling particular information at issue in the Superseding Indictment,” she wrote.
“All told, by latest numbers, the Court is advised that this case involves approximately 1.3 million pages of unclassified discovery …” Cannon wrote.
“The volume and timing of these materials has outpaced initial estimates and required supplementation, both in the normal course and also to correct inadvertent omissions in the Special Counsel’s productions,” she added. “And, as far as classified discovery is concerned, the full scope of such information, including discovery directly pertinent to the substantive counts in the Superseding Indictment, was made available to defense counsel only recently on October 17, 2023, further contributing to delays in defense review.”
Trump, Waltine Nauta, his personal valet, and Carlos De Oliveira, property manager at the former president’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, have pleaded not guilty to all of the charges in the case, which alleges Trump illegally retained and moved classified materials he was not entitled to have in his possession after he left the White House in 2021.
Trump asserts he acted lawfully
In the meantime, Trump has continued to make public assertions that he was entitled to move the documents in question to his Palm Beach estate.
On his Truth Social media platform on Friday, he dismissed a CNN report that a number of his employees may be called upon to testify by prosecutors that they saw various documents and boxes containing them at Mar-a-Lago.
“Of course they did!” he declared. “They may have been the boxes etc. that were openly and plainly brought from the White House, as is my right under the Presidential Records Act.”
CNN said unidentified sources said that witnesses may include members of Trump’s inner circle such as Secret Service agents, former intelligence officials and “workers rarely noticed” by guests at Mar-a-Lago.
Trump called the report, “Breaking Fake News.”